Category Archives: Issue 13

NOT EVEN A GLASS OF WATER by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Black-and-white image of Harold and Matilde Bolton on their wedding day

NOT EVEN A GLASS OF WATER
by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Think of this as an old movie. Black and white and crackling.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1959, while the businesses along Chapel Street in downtown New Haven were emptying out for the glittering holiday, the staid New Haven accounting firm of Rosen & Rosen was receiving an unexpected visitor. The receptionist was gone for the holidays and one of the partners, my father’s cousin David Rosen, got the door for a young woman in a state of great agitation. An old woman, the girl’s aunt, trailed nervously behind, fanning herself with a train schedule. The pair had traveled from Grand Central Station.

The older woman was there for the younger one, her niece Matilde. And Matilde was there for Harold Bolton. Three weeks earlier Harold had left her at the altar in Havana.

Matilde screamed in a thick Cuban accent, “Where is he?” She was carrying a B. Altman shopping bag that ripped as she extracted a crumpled white silk gown. The gleaming silver that followed registered as a butcher’s knife.

Hijo de mala madre. Son of a bitch. Matilde said it over and over in Spanish until she had no more breath.

The aunt, la Tía Ester, muttered in Ladino: “Dio de la Zedakades.” God of righteousness.

Harold emerged from his office at the sound of the commotion. There was Matilde smoothing the handmade wedding dress against her body. This was just the kind of erratic behavior that was among the reasons he had backed out of their wedding at the last minute—that, and his parents’ appalled reaction to his intention to marry a Cuban girl almost half his age. A girl who didn’t know a salad fork from a dinner fork. I imagine her Latina volatility was part of her allure for Harold—a sturdy, only son of Jewish immigrants born in Ukraine who insistently cultivated an American identity. But that afternoon, in the offices of Rosen & Rosen, Harold had no doubt that Matilde was capable of cutting herself or even of stabbing him to death.

Yet Harold also knew that Matilde had reason to be furious. What he had done had been uncharacteristically cowardly, even if it had been for the best. Harold had long ago given up on the idea of marriage, and, at forty, he felt too old to start a family. But when Matilde swept into his life just four months ago like high winds, he latched on to his dreams of marriage and family.

The pressure on Matilde to marry, particularly from her father Jacobo, must have been suffocating. At twenty-four, she should have been long married to make room for her younger sister Raquel who was already engaged. But after Matilde had finally found her groom, a telegram from his parents arrived at Numero 20 La Calle Merced. It said, “Nuestro hijo no puede carase con su hija, Matilde. La Boda esta cancelada.” The wedding in Havana was cancelled a little over three weeks before the December 20, 1959 date.

Matilde’s mother had been pinning her daughter’s wedding gown when Matilde read the Western Union message to her. Matilde keened, “Ay Dios.” Her mother nearly swallowed the pins.

◊

Harold grabbed Matilde, but she wrenched free of his grasp in the reception area of Rosen & Rosen. She dropped the butcher’s knife as her gown fell limply to the floor. She knelt and pulled off the brooch strategically placed on the gown’s neckline to hide just enough cleavage to satisfy her Old World father.

“Look at this,” she hissed at Harold as she caressed the brooch. “It sparkles like the stars—the stars that lined up to cause my misfortune.”

Matilde laid out the gown on the floor so that it looked like the chalk outline of a murder victim. She made sure she had Harold’s attention before she slowly, deliberately raked the dress with her knife in a semi-successful attempt to cut long, raw tourniquets.

“I’m calling the police,” Harold announced. He started dialing a black rotary phone perched at the edge of the empty receptionist’s desk. The dial sounded hoarse, like a smoker. “The police,” he repeated, pointing at the receiver. “Policia.”

He was pretending much the way he would when I was behaving like a recalcitrant child, and he said he had my teacher on the line. But Matilde was unmoved. Her Tía Ester knew that there weren’t many options for an unstable girl from an unstable country. Ester was suitably alarmed and panicked as she shoved the mutilated dress back into the crumpled, torn shopping bag—a bag whose exuberantly scripted B. Altman logo echoed the bold strokes of Harold Bolton’s distinctive signature. With Harold now pointing the receiver at the two women as if it were an officer’s pistol, David Rosen herded Matilde and Ester into the hallway and backed them into the elevator.

“God help both of you,” David Rosen said as the elevator doors closed.

◊

Before the wedding gown was a stand-in for my mother’s homicidal fantasies, my parents had married in a separate civil ceremony as required by Cuban law. A Justice of the Peace in New Haven’s City Hall married them in November of 1959. It was the first time Matilde realized that her distinguished groom was older than the thirty-five years he led her to believe. She gasped less from the sting of being lied to than the superstitions that anchored her life. “We won’t see our fiftieth anniversary,” she cried. They nearly didn’t make it to their first anniversary.

◊

My Abuela Corina had painstakingly mended the dress and arrived with it from Cuba the day before the sparsely attended ceremony on March 20, 1960—four months after City Hall and three months after the botched attempt at a formal wedding in Havana. My mother marched down the aisle of the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue on Central Park West in Manhattan, skirting the annulment my father had initially wanted.

I needed to see the aisle down which they had walked all those years ago. On a late January afternoon in 2012, after I had missed my train back to Boston, I hailed a cab to go to the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, where, fifty-two years earlier, my parents had married. Off I went against a tide of red brake lights. The driver said that he didn’t have any ones or fives. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get to the synagogue, so I paid twenty dollars for a nine-dollar ride. On the cold, dark cab ride, I felt a mixture of longing and curiosity and excitement, as if I were about to go back in time and lurk on the sidelines. I needed to see the place to picture the dimensions of my parents’ wedding, to create pictures that were not taken during the actual ceremony.

My parents posed for a formal portrait a week after they were married. My father wore a dark suit with the white hyphen of a handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket. My mother, already pregnant with me after her wedding night, wore the dress whose plunging neckline was held in check by the sparkling broach. In her white-gloved hands was a cascading bouquet of flowers. Her eyes were rimmed in kohl. Instead of a veil, an embroidered triangle of cloth comes to a point with a pearl at the center of her forehead, creating a lacy widow’s peak. The lipstick unnaturally dark; my father’s cheeks unnaturally pink. They do not touch each other; they do not smile. I have never seen a photograph of them kissing or holding hands. I have never seen them look happy.

The entrance to the synagogue was locked, but through one of the door panes I saw a custodian vacuuming.

“No puede be here,” he said through the glass. “Servicio en six-thirty.”

“Por favor,” I pleaded. “My parents were married in this synagogue mas de cinquento años.” I hoped that such a long stretch of time would impress him enough to open up the chapel for me. “I need to see it. Muy importante.”

He opened the door and motioned for me to put my bag down—my wallet, iPad and train ticket were transferred to this man’s possession. I took off my coat and reflexively put up my hands as if I were being arrested.

“Rapido,” he whispered. As if sending me on a reconnaissance mission he added, “Buena Suerte, Señorita.” Good luck.

I sprinted around the corner into the plush, dark chapel where I stopped at the bima—the raised platform from which the service is conducted—in the middle of the small room. My parents’ huppah—the marriage canopy—must have consisted of four poles to hold up the tallit—the prayer shawl—borrowed from the synagogue and erected in front of the reader’s lectern.

The huppah symbolizes the first home a married couple shares. It is also a stand-in for the tent in which Abraham and Sarah welcomed visitors passing through the desert. With the tallit doubling as the symbolic roof of this makeshift home, it is opened on all sides to represent the couple’s vulnerability to life’s vicissitudes.

As bride and groom, my parents faced the ner tamid—the eternal light above the ark. The Ten Commandments in this chapel were etched in gold on whitewashed tablets. This was a traditional synagogue where men and women sat separately during services. In the style of a Sephardic Jewish synagogue, the women were relegated to the raised benches along the side rather than corralled behind a makeshift wall at the back of the room. But, for this wedding, the Boltons had demanded that men and women sit together. I imagined my grandmother muttering, “My poor boy,” as my grandfather patted her hand. “It’s hard to marry off a son,” he would say.

A few people, just ten—barely a minyan, a prayer quorum—witnessed my parents’ marriage. Among them were my grandmother and aunt, surely elegant in white gloves, hats perched on coiffed hair and shoes fastidiously dyed to match their outfits. My grandfather and uncle would have worn sleek, dark suits with pocket-handkerchiefs like my father. Abuela was too cold to take off the coat she borrowed from my mother’s landlady.

All eyes were initially on my father who stood wide-eyed under the huppah, looking for his bride beyond the same shiny horizon he stared at from the deck of his supply ship during the war. Grandma Bolton called his piercing gaze the “Asian stare.” According to her, it happened to men who were stationed on ships in the South Pacific for months at a time. Their hopes and dreams lay beyond where the thin blue line of ocean met an illusory land mass.

In my mind’s eye, my mother enters the chapel draped in white silk. The significant train of her gown dwarfs the aisle, a long veil covers her face, and flowers tremble in her gloved hands. If the wedding portrait is any indication, my father had the expression of a dial tone throughout the brief ceremony. When the wedding was over, Abuela said that she knew of widows whose second weddings were more joyous.

“Señorita, por favor,” said the custodian interrupting my reverie. Please, Miss. He ran his fingers through his pomaded hair, but I wasn’t quite finished with the chapel. I could see my father shift his weight under the huppah and feel around in his pocket to make sure that he had the white gold band to slip on my mother’s index finger. He also checked his breast pocket to make sure he had the transliteration of the Hebrew words Jewish grooms have said to their brides for centuries.

Harai et mekudeshet lee b’ta ‘ba zi k’dat Mosheh v’ Yisrael. Be sanctified to me with this ring in accordance with the laws of Moses and Israel.

And with that, after seven months of stormy courting and one canceled wedding, my parents were married. After the ceremony, there was no reception, no celebratory dinner with family.

“Ni un vaso de agua,” my mother always says.  There wasn’t even a glass of water.

In accordance with Jewish custom, my father had stepped on the only available glass.

Headshot of Judy Bolton-FasmanJudy Bolton-Fasman is an award-winning writer whose creative nonfiction has appeared on The Rumpus, Salon, Brevity, Cognoscenti, Lunch Ticket, the Rappahannock Review, and 1966: A Journal of Creative Non-Fiction. This essay is based on Judy’s unpublished memoir The Ninety Day Wonder. She lives and works outside of Boston.

Image credit: Harold and Matilde Bolton on their wedding day. Courtesy of Judy Bolton Fasman

VASELINE SANDWICHES by Mark Schoenknecht

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Sketch of large pig

VASELINE SANDWICHES
by Mark Schoenknecht

During pregnancy, she said,
Her most intense cravings
Were for vaseline sandwiches:
Soft white bread slathered with petroleum jelly.

In a dream, I attend a dinner party
At a lavish mansion.
I’m having a wonderful time
Until the unveiling of the roast,
Which turns out to be an animal
With the body of a hog
And my own scalded head
Clenching an apple in its teeth.

Each day, I arrive at the feast of myself,
Unsure of which fork to use,
Of what sauce to slather overtop.

What is it that drives a woman to eat vaseline?
And if I threaten to run my car into an overpass
When she says she doesn’t love me,
What design has prompted that?

Fitting, that the gesture for “crazy”
Is a pointer finger aimed at the temple and rotated.
As if to say the brain is a malfunctioning engine,
To claim insanity as the momentum of busted gears.

In the Great Plains, a farmer
Has dedicated himself
To ingesting a Boeing 747.
Says he’s doing it
To prove his love for a woman.

Once, dreaming, I asked him how it’s possible
To love another so selflessly.
He unbuttoned his shirt in reply,
Instructing me to press an ear to his belly, to listen
For the propellers’ sputtering,
For the aluminum’s groan and creak.
How lucky, I thought, to be made of such things.

Headshot of Mark SchoenknechtMark Schoenknecht’s poetry has appeared in 2River View, The Pedestal Magazine, Driftwood Press, and elsewhere. In 2013, Mark was awarded the David A. Kennedy Prize for his collection Kissing the Girl Who Wore a Mustache. He currently lives in Chicago, where he’s pursuing a PhD in English.

HEIRLOOM by Paul Tran

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Ceramic figure of a man with a beard wearing a hat

HEIRLOOM
by Paul Tran

We know how the story goes.
A pirate leads her off the boat, onto the shore.
He rapes the other women first, shoots them in the head,
feeds their bodies to the ocean’s aching blue mouth.

A pirate leads my mother from the boat to the shore.
He strips her down to her soiled cotton underwear,
feeds her aching body to the ocean’s blue mouth.
She swears he did not rape her.

When he strips me down to my cotton underwear,
my father sets me on his lap like a Barbie doll.
My mother swears he did not rape me.
She tells me to stop making things up.

My father sets me on his lap. Like a Barbie doll,
I obey when he commands me to open, to keep it a secret.
He warns me not to make things up.
His touch leaves a stain I cannot scrub clean.

I obey. Every time he commands me to open, I keep it a secret.
Even now, years later, long after he disappeared like a ghost,
his touch remains a stain I cannot scrub clean.
I am not asking for you to believe me.

Even now, years later, long after he disappeared like a ghost,
my mother still sees the pirate in her dreams, the ocean’s infinite hunger.
She is not asking, but I believe her.
Truth finds a way to exact its obscene measures.

My mother still sees the pirate in her dreams. The ocean’s infinite hunger
swallows her in its waves. She wakes and pretends it never happened.
But truth finds a way to exact its obscene measures,
even when denial appears to be our only choice to survive.

Rising from the waves, I refuse to pretend it never happened.
My father rapes me while my mother is asleep in the other room.
Even when denial appears to be our only choice, to survive
we know how the story goes.

Headshot of Paul Tran Paul Tran is a Vietnamese-American historian and poet. He has won “Best Poet” and “Pushing the Art Forward” at the national college poetry slam, as well as fellowships from Kundiman, VONA, Poets House, Lambda Literary, the Napa Valley Writers Conference, the Home School, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, Split This Rock, and RHINO, which awarded him a 2015 Editor’s Prize. Paul currently lives in NYC, where he is a Graduate Scholar in the Archives at the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and coaches the Barnard College and Columbia University slam team.

Image credit: Kevin Dooley on Flickr

MOUETTES by Kristen Herbert

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Seagull flying

MOUETTES
by Kristen Herbert

Them you can ever hear, the mouettes. When walking by the sandy concrete of empty storefronts, the apartments next to the sea, with their windows closed tightly.

Them you hear from your windows open as you write at the desk. Them you hear in the breeze, as you walk the overpass beside the colossal, four-story clouds. The clouds that swell up from the ground are pure. They are floating across the rails and they are making that you stop. They come from elsewhere and they are not staying.

The mouettes you hear when the streets are quiet, when the air is thick, when everyone else is gone, boarded up, closed behind windows with only the low murmuring, the clinking of forks.

◊

It is raining and the walking people are shining in the puddles. The wind ruffles the ash trees speckled and furrows the silver leaves. The light is skittering between the shadows of figures who shuffle back and forth in the street. The university sits quietly behind the boulevard, the ugly, pushed-in windows covered behind the courtyard unruly.

The tram is gliding slowly through the water. It is saying in voice robotic: Université. Then it is swallowed by the bridge. It ends simply. Beneath clear, speckling rain.

◊

In the darkness, the rail of the tram glistens. The three girls pass between the streetlights, and the one is holding out her arms when she speaks slurred, indignant. She trips on the rail and you are content she goes home with you.

You must be very careful of him, you tell her. He is méchant. He is the first person that I meet here. He is very bad.

Because she take the drugs she does not know the guys have placed bets on her.

I don’t understand why they think they can take whatever they want, she says.

You don’t say anything.

◊

Giono écrit la violence—comme une forme d’art. Pour Giono—

The woman with the clear blue eyes does not blink as she looks at the students, those that crane their heads over the notebooks. The yelling in the street is seeping through the windows with the climbing heat.

La violence n’est pas comme la violence—mais comme une acte de peinture—

Someone is chattering in the back corner in a low voice. The sun is growing stronger through the cracked glass.

◊

October the rain is thick, blinding. The wind tears out the leaves of trees that bend in its enormous power. If you close your eyes you can see August clearly, picture the smashed-up bodies of automobiles piled next to the train tracks. When you found something exciting and new about all the cars you’d never seen before, stacked—red, blue, green, orange, black. Something about the gleaming, acrylic-blue floors of the sunlit train, the excited voices chattering around you in a language you hardly knew.

◊

The last morning. The hasty goodbyes and shoulders rocking against the windows of the train car. She had sat across from you, folded her arms and then her ankles. She had grinned at you haughtily, as if you two were sharing some secret.

Thank God, she kept saying as the train pulled away.

And you had said it too, but then you were looking back at the platform, at the young men shuffling in sagging sweatpants, at the sky discoloring above them. Thank God for going elsewhere. But where?

 

Mémoire

Dinner to celebrate getting away from here: But not French food, she had said. I hate this country. This country where she is followed home after dark and told about her nice thighs and cock-sucking lips.

So you were walking back home, watching where the road bent, where the men’s voices were coming from behind the white pick-up. She had stopped and you had asked why, it’s fine, they are just out for a smoke.

Sometimes I think about how much I could do with my life if it weren’t for the fear of men, she said. And you looked at her, how she strutted with her head inclined slightly, her bag wedged beneath her arm.

But the good news, I got these sharp knitting needles in the mail, she said. I feel like I could defend myself, at least.

She pulled out the sharp knitting needles, but what will those do, what are those needles against the tall heads floating over the library shelves, the deep, frenetic lines carved into temples.

◊

It is hard to say the exact moment. When you feel that you are safe and life is neatly structured the way it is supposed to be. Until a hovering eye that promises to take that crystalline structure and crush it in his solid fist. It would be a pleasure.

◊

What would any of it do, really? You wanted to tell her. It’s not personal, at least. The calling and the whistling, it’s not personal.

◊

He had had his hand on the small of her back, and his eyes had been glowing, his lips splayed meanly, as he watched her swallow the drink he handed her. And she, she was so stupid for not seeing it. And you, you were so stupid for not saying.

And they were holding their drinks and their chairs were facing away, but how did they not see it? Don’t they know him, that he would be waiting? And you, you see it, so how could you not say—

◊

But when the memories are trapped they are always seeping through. They are remembering it is necessary to lie and disappear. They are remembering the baggy clothes and the colorless hats. They are remembering never to look when addressed. They are always asking—who is next? What new face will be burned into your thoughts and will he be leering at you around the cigarette in his mouth, relishing at how his sight makes you run from him?

◊

The young man doubles over laughing as the train stops so the bottle of vodka and orange juice is rolling around at his feet. He is laughing because he can’t speak—“In your country—” he stumbles into the headrest, “In your country—do people carry umbrellas when there is only little rain?”

The train is climbing up the hill and if only you knew. You would start climbing down to the last car, down to the hollow, and never go into the hills again.

But you don’t. And now each day he will follow.

◊

Every morning when it is windy and dark, you two stagger across the dock bridge.

I have this thing called the “fish face,” she says, as you pass by the men in tall rubber boots who sort through the mollusk shells.

See, I used to think that if I looked mean, men wouldn’t bother me, but the other day I was walking through the station, and this guy says, “Hey, girl, why you look so mean? I’m gonna make you nice.”

He would crumple your face. He would. You could never be frightening.

◊

And what would be better, then? To be invisible? To walk so softly your feet don’t clack on the tiles? To sit away from doorways? To take other stairs?

◊

And so he will look sick as he walks down the stairs. He will always look sick, until he finds you again.

 

To He:

This is not admiration.

I am your obsession, but I am nothing to you.

◊

You are gone now. And I am seeing you in the monsters in people’s eyes.

Headshot of Kristen HerbertThis is Kristen Herbert’s first publication. She lives in Chicago, where she works as a barista by day and writer by night. She’s traveled some and lived in France for a while, which she likes to include in her works. She is very excited to be a part of this issue of Cleaver Magazine.

Image credit: Bert Knottenbeld on Flickr

 

MISS DARLENE’S DANCING SCHOOL by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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Children wearing tap shoes

MISS DARLENE’S DANCING SCHOOL
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Miss Darlene, dark, slender, acne-scarred,
married next-door Marvin and came to share
his basement flat. Upstairs, his mother
claimed Miss Darlene had danced with the Rockettes.
She opened a dancing school a block away.
We girls on the block were conscripted to take lessons,
to help support the newly-married couple.

We got shiny black patent leather shoes
with black ribbons and taps on heels and toes.
We danced to East Side, West Side,
all around the town. I can still perform
the opening bars today, but my lessons ended
at a step called the Buffalo, which I never mastered
because Miss Darlene’s closed, she got pregnant.

That was postwar Brooklyn, known for dullness,
before the West Indians came with their bouncy speech
and the Jews in drear black coats and uglifying
wigs. Pre-chic Brooklyn, before the new
colonizers parked their double strollers
outside the bookstores and the restaurants
serving foods Miss Darlene had never heard of.

One scorching summer afternoon
I visited my old street. The West Indians
had adorned the porches with wrought iron curlicues
and painted the front doors in fanciful hues.
Children played in the street as we had done,
the parents on the stoops fanning themselves.
I was the only white person. Near the house

of the family who’d owned the funeral parlor—the hearse
in the driveway at the ready, a reminder–
stood a Mister Softee truck. I got in line.
A woman asked, What was I doing there?
I didn’t say this was my childhood home, simply
that I wanted ice-cream, and she said,
You must want it real bad, to come out here.

Headshot of Lynne Sharon SchwartzLynne Sharon Schwartz’s eight novels include Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award), Rough Strife (nominated for a National Book Award), Disturbances in the Field, and Two-Part Inventions. She is also the author of several collections of essays, stories, and poetry, and translations from Italian. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

THE BABY TRAIN by Bryanna Licciardi

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baby in a mug

THE BABY TRAIN
by Bryanna Licciardi

“I’m not much of a kid person.”

“Do you mean infants? Toddlers? Young children?” the therapist asked.

“All of the above?”

“I see,” she said casually, writing something down in her yellow notepad, though we both knew the question was anything but casual. In this society, it’s always asked shouldering the answer, because everyone wants children, even if only “someday.” As a woman who has never enjoyed the company of children—who in fact has been known to hide when she hears one coming—I’ve found it easier to just evade questions like this with humor. However, this was a serious decision I was about to make, so I answered truthfully.

Without looking up, she said, “And I’m assuming you’re not married?”

Assuming? “Yes, I’m single.”

“Why do you think you’re single?”

What kind of question was that? Because men suck at dating me? Because I suck at dating them? Because I’ve become an expert at not dating?

Instead, I said, “I’m a virgin. And guys tend not to know what to do with that.”

Her face was priceless—mouth open, eyes crooked and bugging. She looked stunned, like she’d just discovered the missing link. “Virgin…” she mumbled. “And you’re twenty-four?”

I nodded.

She leaned forward, pen pressed hard onto her notepad, and spewed out textbook clichés trying to unlock the secret: was there a history of trauma; was I controlled by the church; had I any daddy issues? But alas, as hard as it was to believe, I was a virgin simply because I’d never had sex.

“Well, being in your…situation…as an egg donor is unusual. Do you think that would affect your inclination to meet the child?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, glad to finally have a question I felt comfortable answering. “I couldn’t see the kid as being mine in anyway. No attachment; nothing to compel me.”

“And why do you want to be a donor?”

“Have you tried being a professional student lately?” I scoffed. “Graduate school is expensive. I mean, I’m glad I can help people by doing this, but honestly, I need the money.”

She handed me a business card in case I ever wanted to “talk about things.” I looked at it curiously during the elevator ride down. In the lobby, I threw it away and walked out of the big revolving doors.

◊

After the doctors and agents confirmed my health and sanity, I was transferred to a lawyer because, apparently, the legalese behind egg donation is elaborate, and I’d need representation. I scheduled an hour with the lawyer, thinking that an hour was a bit ridiculous. Until, that is, I opened the computer the next day and watched the contract download for almost twenty minutes. In it, every detail of every possible scenario was discussed: I’d only get paid if I followed procedures exactly. If the baby came out deformed, it may or may not be as a result of my eggs. I could be investigated accordingly. Do I understand that the eggs become the parents’ property, to do with as they please? Though the donation is anonymous, the child has a right to request my identity after it turns eighteen. I have a right to decline…

Every section, subsection, and sub-subsection grew more specific. Around page thirty-eight, I finally realized how serious this was. I was giving away a key ingredient to life. I was giving them a baby, essentially. This child would have my freckles, my eyes, maybe even my cowlick.  It was surreal to think of some kid growing up with my genes, never knowing that she (I’m picturing a girl) came from me. Would I ever want to meet her? Even though I have such unease around children, with their sticky fingers and lack of social skills, I thought I wouldn’t mind seeing her. Though maybe just in a picture, happy with her parents. That way I’d feel good about what I did. Unless she came out distorted or psychopathic. I would not take credit for a serial murderer.

Once my contract was finalized and signed, the pharmacy delivered a very expensive egg-making kit. I set alarms, placed my hormones in the fridge next to the orange juice, had my last glass of wine, and mentally prepared for what was to come.

◊

Each morning, for one month, I woke at dawn to inject myself with synthetic hormones. The nurse explained that the goal of these treatments was to over-stimulate my ovaries so that the lab had plenty of chances to get it right when combining eggs with the father-to-be’s sperm. The nurse mentioned side-effects but brushed them off as no big deal. Seeking reassurance, I scoured online forums for others who’d also taken these injections. I had a hard time finding anything written by donors but found a few from women who’d taken the same medication to get pregnant: Weight gain! Strange food cravings… Migraines… I never stopped peeing… Forget sleep!  It didn’t take me long to live out their complaints for myself.

As someone who’s afraid of needles, I never thought I would be capable of sticking myself with one. To my surprise, I did it with little hesitation for thirty mornings in a row, barely awake. I sat on the toilet, grabbed a handful of stomach, and stabbed. Though my instinct was to get it over with quickly, fear that I’d mess up slowed me down. I’d try to go back to bed, rubbing the sore spot on my stomach, but sleep was often too far gone.

My nightly shots—the hormone stimulators—were even worse. The needle was thicker and the syringe harder to push. After a week, my stomach grew blotchy with bruises. It got harder and harder to find a spot to inject that wasn’t too tender. I moved on to my thighs, but ran out of room there, too.

After almost three weeks, discouragement began to tinge my thoughts. I kept trying to tell myself, One month, one less student loan. Because, after all, this decision to donate began with my mounting debt. They say everything in your life is there for a reason. Graduate school was making me a better (though broker) writer. What was this donation doing for me? I decided my mom would be the best person to talk to. She has always accepted me for who I am, even if she doesn’t understand my choices.

Over the phone, I whined about my bloated and bruised belly, my sporadic emotions; how I actually cried when a contestant from The Voice got eliminated. She paused, hmming, and said, “You know, if we could only get some semen in you, you’d be having triplets at least…and I’d have my grandchild quota.”

◊

Becoming a donor began devoid of any emotional entanglement. Helping out a couple in the process was a karmic bonus, but my incentive was mostly selfish. And because it made my parents, aunts, and cousins extremely uncomfortable, their incessant questions into when I would have children finally ceased—definitely a perk. Sure, there were other motives: guilt that I might mess up the couple’s child; an urge to prove that my body belonged to me, that I was responsible, strong, and could see whatever I wanted to through to the end.

After I started the hormones, started going to the hospital every morning for testing, I noticed my commitment deepening. I was vital to this family. My body was vital to this family, and I needed to take care of it. I read the ingredients on food boxes, avoided caffeine and steered clear of liquor stores. I went home after class because I was too tired; called it a night when parties got too smoky. It became a bizarre relationship—me and my eggs. I was the mother to a tiny thing, or to several tiny things. Though I wasn’t caressing my stomach and singing it lullabies, I knew that my eggs needed care.

I felt out of place. No one else I knew was going through this. This was especially true in the fertility clinic waiting room, a place I visited all too often during my donation. Couples sporting eager faces filled the room. During my first ultrasound visit, I sat waiting impatiently. My foot bounced so hard that my shoe kept falling off. I flipped through the pages of a People magazine. The woman next to me, who appeared to be in her mid-thirties, took notice of my jittering.

“Your first time here?” she asked, glancing not-so-discreetly at my belly. I shrugged, smiling back, not wanting to lie but realizing she assumed I was either pregnant or trying to get there. After a few seconds, she said, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

I could guess what she was thinking: How old is she? What’s wrong with her? Is she like me? Where is the father? I didn’t belong in that room with those people. When no one was looking, I slipped my silver JCPenney ring off of my right hand and onto my ring finger. I held out my hand and looked at it, laughing quietly to myself. I left it there until my procedure ended.

When they finally called my name, I was relieved to leave the public eye. The nurse, a pretty woman not much older than me, led me down the zigzagging hallway and into a dark room. In the middle of that room was the chair. Any woman who’s gone to a gynecologist knows the chair. It’s high, usually with a stool beside to help you climb, draped in thin paper, equipped with the dreaded stirrups at one end. A large machine was set up next to the chair, its screen blinking dark blue. My nurse pointed to a bathroom door on the opposite side of the room. “You can leave your clothes in there,” she said, handing me a hospital gown. “Take off everything below the waist.”

I felt ridiculous climbing into the chair, paper crinkling underneath, my gown tangling and slipping open behind me. The nurse placed my feet up in the stirrups and entombed my legs with a sheet. She unsheathed the ultrasound probe from a drawer. It was a thick, long, white, rounded weapon-of-an-instrument covered in clear plastic. When the nurse handed it to me, telling me to guide it in myself, I looked at it gravely.

“No. You don’t understand,” I said weakly, laughing, seeing how awkward this conversation was about to become. “This isn’t going to fit. I’m still…I’m pretty much…I’m a virgin.”

“Really? Well,” she said, hesitating a bit. “There might be some slight tearing, but it will go in. I promise.”

Liar. That’s what I tried to say, but then the probe moved its first millimeter, and a scream/laugh/gargle came out of my mouth instead. I pretended it was funny because she kept laughing. I’m sure it was, to her. Especially if you ignore the blood I had to wipe from between my legs.

◊

As luck would have it, the extraction surgery fell on Thanksgiving Day. The nurse called me two days prior with instructions to stop the hormones that day and details to administer one last shot. The big one. They called it the hCG, or in layman’s terms, Human Chorionic Gonadotropin. I looked it up, and, according to the web, its job was to force my eggs to tear from my ovary wall in preparation for surgery. Because this shot needed to go all the way into my muscles, the nurse said that the buttocks would be the best injection site, and she recommended I find someone to inject it for me. Since it was a holiday, everyone I knew was leaving town, leaving me alone to put this shot in my butt.

One of my roommates, who was studying to be a nurse, offered to set up the syringe before leaving town. She pulled it out of its box, and I almost fainted. The needle itself, not including the syringe, was the length of my hand and almost as thick as a pencil. As she mixed the medicine, she explained that since I couldn’t reach my butt, I’d have to inject this monster into the next thickest place—my thigh.

“You’re pretty small,” she warned. “So be really careful not to hit any bone. That could do some serious damage.”

I watched all of my roommates leave and, once alone, set my alarm for 2:40 AM. I thought it might be easier to stay up but I didn’t make it past midnight. When my alarm went off, I was awake instantly. I ran to the fridge, snatched the ready-made shot, and jumped back into bed. With the lights on and my legs spread out before me, I stared at the left thigh, the chosen victim. How fragile it looked; how much it depended on me to keep it safe. Before I could chicken out, I stabbed.

After every last drop had left the syringe, I slipped the needle out. When the last of it escaped my skin, a steady stream of blood followed. I hadn’t prepared for that and tried to stop the bleeding with my hand while I grabbed the nearest thing, a yellow bandanna, to tie around my thigh. When I woke up the next morning, I had a bloody yellow tie-dye bandanna tied to my leg, and a limp. My thigh was swollen and sore. I spent the day in bed, massaging it, avoiding any thoughts of my impending surgery, of what I was doing to myself.

◊

I arrived at the hospital in the early afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, aware that families across the country were already on their second helpings of casseroles and turkey legs. The hospital was busier than I’d anticipated, and it took a while to check in. I’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, so I was tired, and luckily so. Sleepiness overrode my nerves, though the nerves built up the longer I waited.

Eventually, a nurse called Kathy led me through double doors covered in cautionary signs. “WARNING: NO PERFUMED CREAMS, LOTIONS, OR DEODORANTS BEYOND THIS POINT!” I couldn’t remember if I’d put on any deodorant and discreetly sniffed my armpits.

Kathy ushered me to an empty bed and gave me a gown to change into. As she prepared the anesthesia, she asked me to hold out my arms so she could find a “juicy” vein. She gasped at the bruises on my arms. “Oh, honey.”

I looked down at them, seeing the many needle marks left behind from the countless blood tests I’d been subjected to. Her reaction startled me, and, whether from exhaustion or fear, I started shaking. She tried to get the anesthesia into place, but none of her needles found a vein. Three stabs and bloody swabs later, Kathy gave up. “You’re too cold and dehydrated, and your veins are too beat up,” she said, rubbing her warm hands over my cold ones. Before she left, Kathy wrapped my arms in a blanket and placed small heating pads in my hands. I was so weak I could barely hold onto them, and the weakness felt like defeat. A few minutes later, Kathy came back with a tall, very pale man, an anesthesiologist, who quickly slipped the needle into my forearm. He spoke with a European accent I couldn’t place and told jokes without smiling as he followed Kathy and me to the operating room.

While the nurse secured my IV drip, one of the doctors helped me climb onto the operating table and flung my legs from the side of the table into very tall stirrups. I didn’t think I could reach them but somehow slid in my legs up to the calves. As I tried to ignore the fact that my lady parts were now very exposed, I noticed how many people were there with me. I counted at least eight faces, half-concealed by masks, before the anesthesiologist slipped a plastic mask around my face. This was beginning to feel like torture.

“Please put me out,” I murmured to him, my voice muffled by the plastic of the mask. There was a slight, bitter smell I recognized as the laughing gas from the dentist, but my nerves kept me alert. “I don’t want to be awake for this.”

“Ah,” he said in his quiet accent. “Since this is your holiday, I make you a special cocktail. It tastes bad, but you will no care.” In my last few seconds of consciousness, I saw the crowd of scrubs creeping in.

◊

My stepmom told the rest of our family that I’d missed Thanksgiving because I had “come down with something.” She said she did it to keep my privacy, but I think she did it out of embarrassment. “My family wouldn’t understand,” she said. “They’re Catholic.” I didn’t know what my eggs had to do with being Catholic, but I didn’t care. It was over. My check would be in the mail Monday morning, and I had finally seen this thing through. I thought I’d feel more accomplished, more relieved. But I lay in bed for three days, bleeding and lonely. At first I thought it was because nobody could understand what I’d gone through, that I’d worked so hard for so many weeks and it was suddenly over. I later read that this is a normal reaction, that my body was crashing from hormone withdrawal.

◊

If someone asked me to describe donating eggs, I’d call it awful, fascinating, transformative, hilarious, and, of course, lucrative. I’d half anticipated that my maternal instincts would emerge, but children still look cuter from way, way, way far away. It did make me realize that this urge to have a family is very real for other people. What I’d undergone to donate must be ten times worse for the woman on the receiving end of my eggs. I want people to accept my choices. Therefore, I must also accept that other people are not me. A simple idea but one that took me more than twenty years to learn.

So perhaps I’ll never want to give birth. Perhaps I’ll never want to raise a family. Perhaps I’ll never be able to look at an egg and see a child any more than I could look at a child and see an egg. Then again, eighteen years from now, if one of my donations asks to meet me, I might be forced to change my mind.

Headshot of Bryanna Licciardi Bryanna Licciardi has an MFA in poetry from Emerson College, an overweight yet incredibly agile cat, and a passion for humiliating herself for the sake of an audience. She is currently a doctoral candidate, studying literacy and reading disabilities. Visit bryannalicciardi.com to read about her past and forthcoming publications.
Image credit: Andrew Mason on Flickr

HOW COME BOYS GET TO KEEP THEIR NOSES?: A Conversation with Tahneer Oksman

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Sketch of Tahneer OksmanA CONVERSATION WITH TAHNEER OKSMAN
author of How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?
Columbia University Press, 296 pages
Interviewed by Ranen Omer-Sherman

Ranen: I love all the epigraphs you begin your new book with but especially the one by Grace Paley, which is such a great way to think about the art of her narrative: “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” Perhaps it is also a kind of prophecy of the radical forms of becoming that so many female Jewish artists seem to be so passionately exploring in our time in visual art, from Jill Solloway’s Transparent all the way through the seven wonderful figures you explore in How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses. In discovering the complicated ways these women explore the relation between self and ethnicity or collective identity, have you learned something about yourself? Does invention figure in your own life as an academic or otherwise?

Tahneer: Oh, absolutely! I was a creative writing major in college, and for a long time I thought that the only way to pursue my dream of becoming a writer was to write novels. It took some time for me to realize that there’s creativity involved in all different kinds of writing and also that you don’t need to write novels to be a “real” writer.

It can be scary to traverse a variety of less popular modes of expression, not only because of the fear that people might not take you seriously but also because you feel like you’re not mastering something, your focus is scattered. Grace Paley’s oeuvre, and her life story more generally, showed me that that was okay. She wrote stories, poems, essays, and speeches; she wrote what she needed to write, not what she thought she should write.

Eventually, I chose an academic path but I’ve tried to continually commit myself to the subjects and projects that interest me. That openness has led me to comics, and women, and memoir, and the question of secular Jewishness. It has led me to write not just academic pieces but also book reviews and interviews and short personal essays. There’s a risk of exposure there—of jumping in before you’ve fully prepared yourself for a new idea or mode—but that vulnerability and playfulness is exciting to me. It’s like with teaching: the richest classes are the ones that end up going in unexpected directions.  

Book jacket for "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?" by Tahneer OksmanR: You recently wrote in Lilith about the paradox of writing a book about “a Jewish topic” when that might subsequently “pigeonhole” you exclusively as a “Jewish writer” even though you and your family have no formal synagogue affiliation and so on. That apprehension immediately resonated with me because when I moved not long ago to Louisville, I was told by quite a few people that in this town the notion of a “free-floating” Jew is an anomaly; every self-identified Jew is invariably identified with one of the five synagogues in the community. I continue to resist that pressure and was thus heartened by what you say about the fulfillment that scholarship seems to give you even where that formal sense of community falls short. Like you, I think that I write “Jewish books” to reclaim something that otherwise does not fully seem to accommodate who I am. In the Introduction, you describe the paradigm of “dis-affiliation” which you say is not a “negation” but rather a “complex negotiation.” It becomes your wonderful overarching premise in the ensuing chapters so that you achieve both disjuncture and coherence where each is required. Did the narratives of these seven very different artists deepen your own sense of ambivalence? Are you more confused now than when you began this project or did their works help you reach a greater sense of identity? And who among these, if any, do you feel closest with in terms of their framing of the community and selfhood?

T: Your description of the impossibility of being a “free-floating” Jew in Louisville is interesting to me. My husband grew up in Syracuse, and we’ve often talked about the difference between growing up in a Jewish environment versus a place where Jews, and Jewish sensibilities, are, let’s say, a distinct minority. He has always felt a strong pride in his Jewish identity, and I often attribute that pride to his having had to explain the Jewish holidays and customs to friends in school. In a sense, he had to justify their existence. Even when I was in public school, I didn’t have to explain anything; everyone just understood what it meant to be Jewish, even if there was a clear variety of different kinds of Jews hanging around. I think my comfort in being “free-floating,” in dis-affiliating, largely stems from having grown up in an environment where I could generally take my Jewish identity, at least in its broadest sense, for granted.

Writing this book, and especially talking to these various artists, did help me see that I wasn’t as exceptional as I had originally thought. I grew up going to an Orthodox Jewish day school but also hiding the fact that my family was not nearly as religious as those around us. At school, I wore skirts and prayed and basically fit in by mimicking the Jewish gestures exercised by those around me. At home, I wore jeans, read Judy Blume, and dreamed of being like the “regular” teens in 80s sitcoms. The disjunction wore me out. It was only years later that I found out how many of us, even in that school, were pretending. Talking to these cartoonists, and writing about them, I realized that although the details of our personal histories were all very different (for the most part), we all ended with a similar sense of ambivalence about our Jewish identities.

Book jacket for Make me a Woman by Vanessa DavisR: This book also tells an important generational story; Kominsky Crumb seems such a vital antecedent for thinking about the others in your study. In your conversations with them and/or readings of their interviews and reflections, did you sense that she was equally crucial to their own sense of vocation? Aside from Vanessa Davis, were the others generally enthusiastic about her early work? Do some of them exhibit the same resistance to her work as those who championed Robert Crumb but disparaged her own visual caricature portrayals of the body?

T: In Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic narrative, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Minnie, an aspiring cartoonist, writes a fan letter to Aline Kominsky. She references Kominsky Crumb, along with Robert Crumb, Diane Noomin, and Justin Green, as her favorite artists. The film version of the book really plays up the character’s connection to Kominsky Crumb in particular. In several scenes, Minnie has whole conversations with her hero and muse.

I think for women cartoonists especially, Kominsky Crumb has been such an important figure. It’s not that men can’t mentor women, or be role models for them, but it’s so important, and particularly for young women starting out, to have other women to look up to. And it’s not just about seeing a woman in the vocation of cartoonist; I think it’s even more about seeing topics that are important to women explored on the page. It’s about watching women grapple with sexuality, and their relationships to their bodies, and their fears and desires about work and friendship and family and love.

Book jacket for Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir by Aline Kominsky CrumbMost of the cartoonists I spoke with mentioned Kominsky Crumb as an important influence. It wasn’t just her work but also the Twisted Sisters anthology she put out with Diane Noomin. While on the one hand it can be exhausting and somewhat infuriating to be pigeonholed as a “woman” cartoonist, ripe mainly to be published in “women’s” anthologies, on the other hand we still need those spaces, even now. Without them, we might take for granted that certain sensibilities are often presumed to be central, fundamental: certain genres, certain ways of drawing, certain kinds of art and writing. In order to view the whole spectrum of possibility out there—to be open to all kinds of creation and invention—it’s important to create these safe spaces. Kominsky Crumb was a visionary in that way when it comes to the world of comics.       

R: I thought it was very astute of you to conclude, perhaps counter-intuitively, with Liana Finck’s A Bintel Brief (given that it is based on the advice column that ran in the Yiddish The Forverts for immigrant Jews fresh off the boat that was created in 1906 by the paper’s legendary editor Abraham Cahan) to suggest the myriad “ways that the present informs the past even while that past continually and forcefully imposes on the present.”

Book jacket for A Bintle Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York by Liana FinckFor instance, there is an early moment in Kushner’s Angels in America where an ancient rabbi expounds at the funeral for a deceased matriarch: “She was…not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak Shtetl, your air the air of the steppes—because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.” I like the fascinating shift in tenses and the promising sense of interpenetrating temporalities. But in the subsequent drama, the point seems utterly lost on all the other characters. Do you think this is a preoccupation of Jewish women artists in recent years or does something analogous happen in the works of male artists (graphic and otherwise)?

T: This is a really interesting question. Certainly, I didn’t intend to suggest in the book that it is only women (and only Jewish women, at that) who are thinking about and exploring identity in these interesting, formally experimental ways. The model I present is really meant as a starting point, a kind of suggestive approach. Maybe even a prelude.

And yet, I can’t help but think that there may be something of a more direct or easy access to particular kinds of truths for artists who have been marginalized, or felt themselves as outsiders in some deep way. Soloway’s show powerfully does what I found Finck’s work to do: it meaningfully brings the past into the present, without burying the present or depriving it of its energy, its, well, currency. Similarly, the cartoonist Leela Corman has this incredible piece called “Yahrzeit,” published online in Tablet in 2013, in which she connects her grandfather’s experiences in World War II, his losses, with her experience of mourning her first child. That piece so expertly bridges the weight of both events, reflecting how those losses never really have an ending point. They just continue, on and on, merging with future losses.

As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, living in a world where we will soon lose access to all our live witnesses of this event, this kind of temporal inventiveness is not just compelling to me; it’s urgent.

R: You often seemed to develop very illuminating personal conversations or email exchanges between your subjects. Did you find that most of these artists were eager to discuss their works or were some reticent about speaking on behalf of their work and/or revisiting sometimes difficult or even traumatic pasts for any reason?

T: To me, one of the most fun aspects of writing about artists who are still living is that I get to talk to them. It’s also, as you might imagine, incredibly intimidating. I want to be honest and critically astute about the work, as much as possible, but many of these artists have become people I consider friends.

 I try to write, as much as possible, without the artist in mind as an audience. Once I have an argument set down on paper, that’s generally when I start formulating questions for the creator. These generally fall into two categories: questions I have that I think will help illuminate what I’ve already written about, and questions I have that I think might potentially transform or even weaken my points. It’s often a surprise, in the end, which leads to which.

All of the artists that I’ve approached have been generous with their time and eager to discuss their work. I think it can be useful to have an outsider to talk to; it can help the artist see what’s coming through in her works. I’m very careful to speak about the characters in these autobiographical works as characters, as personas. I think this also makes it a bit easier for the artists to open up. I’m not, after all, talking exactly about them, even if I am talking about their lives.

R: I love the artful ways you quite often pause to place these works in compelling conversation with more traditional Jewish memoirs as well as novels. In your ideal course would you adopt a hybrid approach and include both narrative forms or do you think it is important to focus on visual narratives exclusively? Have you taught an entire course on graphic narratives?

T: This is something I think about a lot, and I hope to engage with more closely in my next project. I named and explored some Jewish literature in the introduction of the book in order to situate the comics that I wrote about as part of this broader literary genealogy. I think it’s important to recognize connections that go beyond particular genres and mediums. This, again, helps us broaden the ways we approach various so-called canons. 

In terms of teaching, I think the approach depends a lot on the objective of the course. A few years back, I taught an upper-level English class at Rutgers that was focused on both fictional and non-fictional contemporary American comics. I tried to offer students a glimpse of all that was out there, but of course I had to make many unscientific choices in terms of readings in order to maintain a manageable course load. What was most valuable for students who took that course—to my mind, at least—was that they learned about the formal possibilities of the medium, and were able to think broadly of how and why we categorize different forms of communication, of art.

In my current job at Marymount, I mostly teach writing courses, so my course objectives are very different. But I do often end up pairing a work of comics alongside a work of literary prose. This semester, for example, I am teaching a writing course called “Writing the Visible,” and one of the central questions we’re engaging with is what it means to read images as opposed to words, and vice versa. We’ve started off by reading Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, and students have had multiple opportunities to engage with the text visually, from writing about the different covers of the book to thinking about what it means to create a portrait of a person, whether visual or verbal. Later in the course we’re going to be reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and I think the juxtaposition of those two kinds of texts will trigger some compelling discussions about memory, images, and autobiography. Most crucially, I think it’s important not to turn such conversations into basic comparisons; we’re not reading comics versus prose, but comics alongside prose. I’ve been playing with the term “expansive reading” to describe this kind of interaction.

R: Finally, I want to offer you a compliment: there are many people who like to write about comix and graphic narratives but only a very few who truly have the savvy to rigorously analyze their visual dynamics as well as the textual aspects. You manage that so well; really helping to shape and guide my perceptions as a reader and alert me to the significance of things I might have otherwise passed over. Did this come easily to you? You seem so attuned to the form,

T: This certainly wasn’t always easy for me to do, especially as someone trained in reading and writing about literary prose. I think my “aha!” moment came some years back, when I was on an academic panel with several people discussing comics. One of the panelists had a background in art history. Hearing her talk about comics using the visuals as a starting point, rather than an accessory, made me much more attuned to how I might better engage with such texts. I actually went home and order a bunch of art history readers, just to get a better sense of some of the central ideas and questions that visual critics think about when approaching texts. It was not unfamiliar, but the emphasis hadn’t always been there for me.

I will say, I love the added challenge of writing about image-texts. While I grew up as someone who loved immersing myself in prose—we’re talking long novel after long novel—and while I still largely think of myself as a lover of prose, I have a lot more fun writing about comics and other visual texts (like memoirs that incorporate photography) than I do about texts composed only in prose. It feels like there’s more to negotiate, like there’s more space for the unpredictable.  

Headshot of Ranen Omer-ShermanRanen Omer-Sherman is JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville and the author of three books and the co-editor of two, including Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature, Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert, Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature & Film, The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, and Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture. He has also contributed numerous journal essays and book chapters to major publications.
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Sketch of Tahneer Oksman

Tahneer Oksman is the Graphic Narrative Reviews Editor for Cleaver Magazine. She is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Director of the Academic Writing Program at Marymount Manhattan College, and she recently published her first book, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs. 

Drawing of Tahneer Oksman by Liana Finck.

THE GAS STATION by Edward Hopper by Michael Kern

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"The Gas Station" by Edward Hopper, 1940, Museum of Modern Art

THE GAS STATION
………by Edward Hopper
by Michael Kern

The difference is light –
the natural settling of shade
upon the road
and the artificial illumination
of the store, lines cast
in degrees of transparency.
The attendant, caught in the middle,
counts the number of cars
that pass. Occasionally
he prays for headlights,
but he mainly passes time
outside waiting for Apollo
to come and turn his Mobil Gas lights
into mosquito traps.
The symbol of Pegasus
is backlit and blazing, a steady
beam that is reduced
to nothing more than a glint
in the eye of a passing driver
too focused on earth-bound deer
to worry about the speck of light
that is now getting further
and further in the rearview mirror.

Headshot of Michael KernMichael Kern lives and writes in Washington, DC. He enjoys cooking, riding his bike everywhere, watching baseball, drinking good beer, making people laugh at his enthusiasm for Slurpees, and frustrating his friends by always being punctual. His work has previously appeared in Tidal Basin Review, Words Apart, and Blast Furnace. His poem “The Current Was Weak” appears in Issue No. 11 of Cleaver.

 

 

Image credit: “The Gas Station” by Edward Hopper, 1940, Museum of Modern Art

GETHSEMANE by Aaron Graham

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Agony in the Garden by Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506)

GETHSEMANE
by Aaron Graham

I’m learning to sweat—learning to swear.
When I speak of God, edges of broken-
glass words: the father who art elsewhere,
thou cannot stitch together jawbones with breath
breathing life in pierced tongues and barbed
sentences. I don’t want mankind to work anymore at
establishing communications or commandments
thou shalt stop ignoring that I cry with and at your creation.
In a no story neighborhood

I read all the time,
letters glyphed on a page like I am If I
would ease into taking notes I’d find
something to do when there was really
nothing I could do.

A woman, whose name might have been
Eros, demanded I pack my unfolded I-love-
you’s, some not even dry yet, run them back
between clenched jaws, let myself down
from the rack and leave her

smelling bittersweet—like dried blood on
cracked linoleum listening
to those damned birds who wear
the dust like an old tweed jacket.

Headshot of Aaron GrahamAaron Graham hails from Glenrock, Wyoming, population 1159, which boasts seven bars, six churches, a single four-way stop sign, and no stoplights. His work explores the relationship of desire and violence currently ostensibly through juxtaposing Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with classical exilic figures. He is an alumnus of Squaw Valley Writers Workshop and the Ashbury Home School. He is a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he served with Marine Corps Intelligence as an Arabic linguist. Aaron is currently finishing his PhD at Emory University; specializing in modernist poetics, Arabic language poetry, continental philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience.

Image credit: Agony in the Garden by Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506)

SUGAR by Meggie Royer

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Pile of sugar

SUGAR
by Meggie Royer

When my mother takes us to the sea
my father does another line.
At night when someone comes downstairs
for a drink of water
the kitchen table stretches itself into shadow
like a paper tiger.
Once, at the bottom of the steps,
wavering before the stove,
I saw him take so much
his eyes rolled back in his head.
On some mountains, the bodies
are never recovered.
Just salvaged.
A string of beads, a broken glass,
bloodwork losing itself to memory.
The things we do to ourselves
trail like tire marks into snow.

Headshot of Meggie RoyerMeggie Royer is a writer and photographer from the Midwest who is currently majoring in Psychology at Macalester College. Her poems have previously appeared in Words Dance Magazine, The Harpoon Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, and more. She has won national medals for her poetry and a writing portfolio in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and was the Macalester Honorable Mention recipient of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Prize.

THE LIVING MUSEUM by Jen Knox

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People standing in a museum looking at a painting

THE LIVING MUSEUM
by Jen Knox

I am on the bus with a cloth grocery bag and my notebook, trying to depersonalize my urge to speak to the man next to me. He is over six feet with no ring, and he already looked my way a few times. Now, mouth open and eyes fixed, he watches the reddening sky with everyone else, while I watch him. I long to be a part of the sky.

The little girl across the aisle points to the window when I look her way, but I just nod and write. My urges are part of a condition, not part of me. They will pass. Meanwhile, the impending storm is bathing everyone in soft, flattering light.

My goal is to avoid triggers until I become stronger, but this requires meticulous planning—more planning than I thought given the bus schedules and a rather inconvenient mistake I made some months back. The problem is numbers. Well, that and proximity.

I slept with Jack, who is my neighbor, who has sticky eyes and lifts his eyebrows often when he speaks to me, as though always genuinely interested in everything. Jack is a waiter with odd shifts. I knew he would be a problem when he moved in, but I successfully resisted his extended company until he invited me to an open mic night on a particularly lonely Tuesday evening.

It is never the good poetry that gets me. Good poetry is a brief release from body and mind, but good poetry is rare. Besides, there’s something about bad poetry—I think it’s the intensity with which the material is delivered, the naïve beauty translated, the human desire to be heard, to be seen, even if a voice is swathed in cliché and melancholy.

I have seduced many mediocre and outright horrible poets in the last few years, so many in fact that my likeness appears in at least half a dozen chapbooks that I keep in a small safe along with my passport and divorce papers. I make a point to buy and read as many literary journals as I can, searching for my depiction as though I were Waldo, lost in red and white—the conceptualized, hypersexual version.

I find it curious that, of those approached, no one has outright resisted my advances. Perhaps my suffering is just less passive. I am irresistible due to the slight curl to my upper lip, someone once said. Mom used to call me Little Elvis.

I was a willing muse. It pained me to stop going to open mic nights, but it was the museums and galleries that really tugged at my soul. Long before I began treatment, I was a regular in the gallery district. Often, a painting would propel me to grab a guard by his belt loop. “No touching,” the best of them said. He still calls. I sometimes answer.

It was never the obvious exhibits. It was a single painting the size of a hardcover book—an abstract forest with richly colored angles. It was the sculpture of a miniature armoire made of forks with an old boot resting on top, a single shoelace untied. I would talk about juxtaposition or color or dimension and wonder how any person could go home to an empty bed night after night. I’d think that shoe was at least a size eleven, and I’d imagine its owner.

I use graham crackers for Mr. Graham’s intended purpose—to squash desire. I eat them plain, to be dunked in milk and allowed to dissolve on my tongue in order to distract. I eat them one after another on particularly lonely nights. I eat them until they begin to taste like nothing. I have four boxes in my bag.

One day, I will enter the museum without willing the person next to me to slip his hand into the back pocket of my jeans, and I will enjoy art. I will listen to poetry without intent. One day, I will be able to sit on this bus, next to this slender man—or one like him—and not even register the slow way he chews a piece of gum.

When one of the security guards I picked up at a gallery a few months ago showed up at Jack’s apartment for a party, there were only eyes to tell stories, but it was this day—so close to home—that I decided to begin therapy three days a week. Most of my check goes to rent and therapy now, so I can’t afford excursions. This works out well because the likelihood of two people I slept with showing up in a single location again is increasing.

Generally, I aim to arrive between four and five-thirty to avoid Jack. I would’ve made perfect time today, but the bus keeps stalling and people keep discussing the sky. When I finally reach my stop, a short man debusses before me.

I notice his shiny shoes moving quickly. His pants are worn at the bottoms—the contrast would catch any artist’s eye. This man is a walking painting, I think, and I want to meet the painter. As we wait for the crosswalk, I see him examining my bag, so I offer him a graham.

He points toward the mass of red clouds moving along the panhandle. “Winds up to thirty miles per hour,” he says, double-checking his phone to confirm. He smiles at me, an old gold filling winking dimly from the back of his mouth.

I still have the bag with the graham crackers pointed his way. He works the cardboard loose and takes one before walking off. As I watch him go, I finally notice the sky as everyone else does. People stand, staring.

I realize I don’t have to wait at this crosswalk because there are no cars. Winds this strong and clouds this dense mean lost visibility, and drivers have pulled over. Red dust dances in the wind, and I have to blink fast to see anything until it settles.

“Be careful out there,” the man yells from half a block away. He opens an industrial-sized umbrella before speed-walking toward a pearl-colored Jetta, which confuses me. I want to run after him, to ask if I can borrow his big umbrella because it looks as though it could guard me from anything and might be able to double as a boat; the sky looks as though it is about to open up.

I wonder briefly what it would be like to curl up with the man in the back of the Jetta. I imagine a brown interior, soft. Instead, I hurry toward my apartment with the cloth grocery bag handle around my left wrist.

Summer-long droughts made the rains that began yesterday headline news, but when the clouds turned red, while I was shopping for my grahams and humming to the brilliantly numbing sounds of The Smiths, panic began to rustle up around me. Now, those of us outside have our phones poised as though they are shields.

The online news is replaced by sermons—celebrity preachers praying for our souls. Then come instructions to get inside, blasting on all public speakers, creating an unsettling tone that will keep my ears ringing.

The rain is thickening, visible in the distance, falling in heavy clumps, as though being squeezed out like dough. It is slowly violent, sealing people in their homes and cars. The best option is to run for a bridge, somewhere open but sheltered. Locking ourselves away in our homes appears a death sentence.

People are abuzz, gossipy flies. Someone says it is a mixture of volcanic ash and sludge. The thickness may be due to the humidity and wind.

“They say there’s an extreme heat wave following this craziness.” Jack’s voice is not deep, not rough. Still, it echoes. He is wearing a large coat with a checkered lining that peeks out from the collar. Thick clothes make sense. He posts pictures to social media and asks me to pose for a selfie with him, selling it like this: “It might be your last one.” I wave him off, say I’ll take a quick shot of him instead. “Put on the filter,” he says.

“Are you kidding? Selfies in Pompeii?”

“This lighting is great,” he says.

It looks as though he is standing in front of a green screen, a garishly fake background behind him—as though he was supposed to be on Mars or in the middle of, well, the apocalypse. He stands smiling, waving at me as though it’s been years, and I feel a familiar nudge to grab him and tell him this is it, our final days, so why not?

“Take a few,” he says. His narcissism breaks the spell, if momentarily. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to avoid Jack if I got to know him well enough.

“You realize this might be pointless? These clouds will erase us all,” a woman says through gritted teeth. She holds her hand out and a stray dollop of clay lands in her palm. As it expands, she tries to peel it off and cannot.

I drop my grahams. News blares over loud speakers and a message flashes across all mobile screens. I hear and see nothing until someone yells, “The rain is turning people into fucking statues!”

Becoming fucking statues could be nirvana.

Jack grabs my hand, pulls hard. It feels like a slow, cool shower. It feels like a thick bath. It is seductive, a coating of cool paint. My feet begin to stick, and I lift one to find myself leaning forward, but I fight to reposition. I tense every muscle, focus, but soon I am immobilized to the ankles, then calves. Jack is stuck on his knees.

It happens quickly, with a wave of heat. I feel my skin pulling toward the clay, beginning to dry, and I struggle to control what I can—to reach for Jack’s hand. In mere hours, we are solid and begin to crack in the hot, Texas sun.

Some say we still look alive, that our shells just need to be chipped away to reveal the life within, but these people are regarded as eccentrics by others. They all speculate in some way, however, because when we engage them they become transfixed. They are captured in a moment, relieved of all urges, if briefly.

No one will take photos at The Living Museum, but they will arrive in droves to meet us. They will surmise different scenarios, cite erroneous sources, touch when guards are not looking, guess and claim to know our relationship. They will say Jack worshiped me, revered me, and rightfully so.

Meanwhile, when they arrive, we will watch them and their world as though they are the ones on display. We will continue to watch, just as they always dreamed someone would.

Headshot of Jen Knox Jen Knox is the Writers-in-Communities Program Director at Gemini Ink in San Antonio and a freelance Writing Coach. She is the author of After the Gazebo (Rain Mountain Press, 2015), and her short work can be found in The Adirondack Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Istanbul Review, Room Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post. Find Knox here: www.jenknox.com
Image credit: amira_a on Flickr

MOUSE MEAT by Rebecca Lee

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Tabby cat looking at a mouse

MOUSE MEAT
by Rebecca Lee

“Let’s go downtown.” It’s the chant I hear every weekend. Downtown is where the lights are. It’s where the girls go. The makeup, the short skirts, the pot smokers, and the boomboxes. They’re all there.

“Let’s go downtown.” The teenage guy I have a crush on, Matt, is asking his friends if they’re going. His voice is slow, low, and slick like rain. They sit at the back of the bus and blast Sublime on a battery-powered radio.  I’m twelve. He’s seventeen. It could happen if I wear the right clothes.

“Let’s go downtown,” I say to my neighbor, Laura, later that night. Laura’s four years older and has a license. She can borrow her stepdad’s car. She smokes cigarettes and listens to En Vogue. It’s hot out, and it’s close to summer. We’re getting older. I can feel it.

I grab the black pleather halter top with red lace stitching. Short skorts in spring tease the boys, but make me comfortable. I lace up my boots. Knee high and red leather. Just like the kind I see on MTV.

We go downtown several hours later. I sneak out of my house, and she sneaks out of hers. The suburbs are unnaturally dark with no streetlights or store fronts. The field of tall grass by our houses shivers from a dull wind. It must be coming from downtown. That’s where everything happens.

“Look.”  We get out of the car and instantly see Matt’s friend from the back of the bus. Hacky Sack Boy. He’s the guy that she likes. He’s sitting on the ground playing guitar and singing lyrics he wrote himself. “He’s so creative,” she says. He looks just like Matt. If we each got married to one of them, we could wear matching gowns.

“Go talk to him,” I say.

The clickable comb comes out. She teases her hair up and then mashes her finger into a miniature lip balm container. Cucumber watermelon.

“I’ll be right back,” she says.

◊

Downtown bars with neon lights twinkle across the street. Girls wearing all black with torn tights stand in groups together. A man with long blond hair is selling CDs at a stand across the way. Maybe he has the En Vogue CD Laura plays for us in her stepdad’s beat up Honda Civic. Maybe she’ll think I’m cool for buying it.

“Hi,” I wave to CD Guy. He has wrinkles around his mouth. If he speaks, I bet he will sound gravelly.  When he stares at me, he looks for a beat too long. My pleather halter top.  Bare shoulders in the dark.

“Hey,” his smile stretches. His voice is higher pitched and dented at the end as if lilting slightly upward. Even though he’s older, he has a boyish quality about him. “Those boots are pretty sexy.”

He thinks I’m older. He thinks I’m older. He thinks I’m older. I flash him a smile, the same one Laura wears except with braces. “Thanks,” I say, but I can’t look him in the eye.

“You look like a cool girl. What kind of music do you like?” He is all eye crinkles. Gazing down my shirt. Flat chested. I wish I had stuffed.

“You have En Vogue?” I try to hide the squeak in my voice. The volume gets caught somewhere in the top of my throat until words skitter at a faster pace than I’d like. It’s the thing that always gives me away. When I tried talking to Matt, my voice was so quiet and high pitched he called me a mouse. “Mouse meat,” he said. I thought of road kill.

“Of course. They’re my favorite.” His smile is almost feminine behind his long hair. He brushes it behind his ear. I see flashes of gray tucked to the side. A bald spot is poking out on top. “It’s in my van, a few streets down.”

I nod. That’s that. Moving on.

“Why don’t you come with me, and I’ll just give it to you. A gift.” Maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe we weren’t moving on.

He likes me. He’s old, but he likes me. I stare back at Laura, but she’s talking to Hacky Sack Boy.

“Let’s go to the van.” He is already walking. His hand is outstretched. I’ve never held a guy’s hand before.

The bar lights are flickering. It’s late. Past eleven. I can smell something sour on CD Guy’s breath. I take his hand, and instantly it feels too soft. As if he could dissolve if I touch him hard enough. He smiles and the eye crinkles come back.

“Hey!” I hear a girl’s voice in the background. It’s Laura! She’s running full speed down the street and coming straight for me. “I have to talk to you.” She grabs my arm and whispers loudly into my ear. “Hacky Sack has a girlfriend.”

Laura’s about to cry. Her eyes are glass. I let go of CD Guy’s hand, and his mouth becomes like two tightrope lines strung together at the corners. If Laura can’t be with Hacky Sack Boy, I don’t want to be with anyone either.

“I have to go,” I say to the man. His face closes like a window. He is shut down.

“Do you want to stay downtown?” Laura is now crying, but I can tell she doesn’t want to ruin our adventure. The tears fall freely. Her face is like a peach without the fuzz, and I wonder if she’ll stay soft forever. I look out at the bars and notice a couple in their twenties. She is tilting her head back, exposing her throat. Her voice slides out like butter. Someday that will be me.

“Let’s go home.”

Headshot of Rebecca LeeRebecca Lee currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has been published in Existere Journal, Rusty Nail, The Noctua Review, and others. Read more at her website.

AUBADE: A Parallel Poem by Yuan Changming

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Steaming cup of coffee

AUBADE: A Parallel Poem
by Yuan Changming

You might have stayed up
All night, clicking at every link
To your daydream, searching
For a soulmate in the cyberspace

You might have enjoyed an early dose
Of original sin between sleep and wake
Before packing up all your seasonal greetings
With your luggage to catch the first plane

Or sitting up in meditation
With every sensory cell
Widely open to receive
Blue dews from nirvana

But you did not. Rather, you have just
Had another long fit of insomnia and
Now in this antlike moment, you are
Imagining a lucky morning glow

That is darting along the horizon

Headshot of Yuan ChangmingYuan Changming, eight-time Pushcart nominee and author of five chapbooks (including Kinship and The Origin of Letters [2015]), is the most widely published Mandarin-speaking poetry author who writes in English. Growing up in a remote Chinese village, Yuan started to learn English at 19 and published monographs on translation before moving to Canada. With a PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver, and has poetry appearing in Best Canadian Poetry,  BestNewPoemsOnline, Cincinnati Review, Threepenny Review and 1089 other journals across 37 countries.

LAST WORDS by Willie Davis

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Dog in front of a fence

LAST WORDS
by Willie Davis

For a long time, I kept myself awake by writing personalized suicide notes for each of my friends. I’d found a website that compiled every recorded suicide note of the last ten years, and, not to sound conceited, I could do better. To be fair, a lot of the note writers were teenagers, and some of the older ones had already taken enough sleeping pills to write like teenagers, but these were pretty pedestrian. They tried to fit the whole world into one paragraph, so all the sorrows clanged together. Also, seriously, every third letter used the phrase “ocean of sadness.”

Go small, I whispered into my computer, after reading an open-veiner yammer about “piles of endless infinity.”  Talk about the disappointment gathering at the pit of your stomach every Sunday evening, so slight and predictable you can mistake it for hunger. Talk about waking up five minutes before the alarm clock rings. Talk about your cousin who loves telling people he loves jazz. I know pain, and I know escape, but I don’t know one infinity, let alone piles.

The hardest part of writing a bang-up suicide note for the living is guessing each person’s method of self-destruction. They each had their separate styles. Pill-poppers talked of betrayal, of friends who walked out, the beating of their own broken hearts. Shooters were brief—they didn’t care if anyone read it. The people who hanged themselves were the best because they had a sense of humor. They understood they were leaving a body behind, swinging like the world’s fattest wind chime.

The only time I ever told any of my friends I was setting them up for posterity, I was on half-a-suicide mission myself. Meander Maddox and I had been tasked with wandering through Irishtown and finding Ollie Nunez’s runaway black mastiff. Somebody had purposefully taken the dog off the leash while Nunez was inside a party in Prospect Hill, the shanty town peak overlooking the rest of the neighborhood. Nunez assumed Meander had done it, and he sent the two of us into the cold to try to retrieve the animal.

Ollie Nunez had been the monster at the end of our book for five years now. When Meander and I were kids, we worked for him, selling dime bags and fake IDs. Nunez’s sense of justice was as nuanced as a cymbal crash. If we didn’t hit our numbers, he’d take us to the shaded part of Orman Park and mete out Old Testament-style justice on our spines. These weren’t great working conditions, but I couldn’t file a complaint with the union. Meander, on the other hand, loved pain, and he’d sometimes give away nickel bags just to provoke a beating. Except now we were older, and even a professional crash-test dummy had to grow tired of bouncing his chin against the pavement.

“Did you write a suicide note for me?” Meander asked. “Who do I thank?”

“You don’t thank anyone,” I said. “That’s an Oscar speech.”

“But how do I kill myself?” Meander asked.

“Suicide by cop,” I said. “You find a cop with AIDS and blow him.”

We were leaving Irishtown and moving toward Garron Heights, a neighborhood we nicknamed Little Indianapolis because we assumed it had to be the most boring suburb in America.

“My suicide note would just be a long downward pointing arrow,” Meander said. “I’d buy a paint roller, hop out of a third story window, and hold the roller against the building.”

“That’s not an arrow, that’s a line,” I said.

“No, because before I jumped, I would have painted the arrow ends, so it would be pointing right to my body.” He grinned at me, waiting for congratulations. “Oh come on, that’s pretty good. Like as a statement on life.”

“If you do that, I’ll go to the fourth floor and write, ‘This Man Has A Micropenis’ directly above the arrow.”

We stopped into a fire station to ask if anyone had seen a black mastiff, but no luck. We tried to talk to some kids playing touch football in the middle of the street, but they wouldn’t even stop their game to answer. At that point, we were pretty much out of ideas and had to go back to searching streets we’d already been down before.

“This dog is doomed,” I said. “If we haven’t found it yet, then it doesn’t want to be found.”

“I like how every mammal is born with the instinct to run away from Nunez,” Meander said. “Anything he doesn’t literally tie up leaves him.”

“Are you scared of him?” I said. “I know what we’re supposed to say, but seriously, are you scared?”

“Kind of,” he said. “As in, I’d prefer it if he wouldn’t work out his daddy issues on my nose, but I know he’s going to do it. I’m terrified, but terror gets boring after awhile. I expect him.”

“We aren’t meant to be scared anymore,” I said. “We act like kids. Aren’t we at some point supposed to join the rest of the world?”

“Do you want to know something funny?” Meander said. “Like, really crazy?”

I braced myself. “Is it that you untied the dog? Because I already kind of figured that you did.”

“I didn’t,” Meander said. “Why would I do something to a dog?”

“The working theory is that you’re an asshole,” I said. “And you did it for asshole reasons.”

“But I didn’t.” A soft breeze blew the smell of fish oil and curdled milk from a nearby dumpster. “What I was saying was that when I’m out like this, on the street searching, sometimes I wonder what it would be like if you found a baby. Like a dumpster baby you hear about on the news. I don’t wish for it exactly, but kind of.”

“Wow,” I said. “That is seriously so much worse. I really wish you’d untied the dog.”

“Not a dead one,” he said. “But you asked about growing up, and all I can think of is that’s the grown-up world. I keep expecting that world to uncover itself. Nunez scares me, but not near as much as I scare me. I have imagination.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah,” he said. “In fact, this one time, I imagined my hand was a vagina.”

I shook my head. “I never know when to believe you, and I don’t even know when I want to believe you.”

“You don’t know—” His eyes went wide and he stopped himself. “Jesus Christ.”

“I know Jesus,” I said. “Early thirties, nice guy, beard, God raped his mom.”

But Meander wasn’t listening. He stared glassy-eyed over my shoulder, and then he broke into a full-on sprint. By the time I turned around, he was halfway up the street, hurtling toward a young boy on the corner playing with a big, black mastiff.

When I caught up to the two of them, Meander was out of breath, but he already had his hand on the dog’s collar. “Where’d you get this thing?” he said over his own wheezing. “You just find it?”

“My dog,” the kid said. He couldn’t have been more than seven.

“Yeah, what’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said. “My brother found him.”

“Your brother’s a fucking thief,” Meander said. “Trying to get my balls busted for your brother. Tell him, if I ever meet him—” He took a breath. “Wait, what’s your brother? Ten? Tell him nothing will happen to him, but, you know, he’s a fucker.”

We walked back to Prospect Hill, taking turns hunching over and holding the dog’s collar. Meander found a torn t-shirt in a garbage can that we fashioned into a leash. When we were four blocks away, Meander said he was going to leave and let me take credit for returning the dog. He didn’t want to see Nunez’s gratitude because it would confuse him.

“Maybe this is how it happens,” I said. “We grow and become something we weren’t this morning. We weren’t meant to find this dog, but we did. The world had its plan, but we disobeyed it. We make the world we want.”

“That or we robbed a kid of his dog, and a dog of his happiness, just to help someone we don’t like.” He smiled at me and walked away, while the dog tugged me farther in the opposite direction. Whenever Meander left my sight, I worried I’d never see him again.

Friends and victims, I thought, following the dog as it dragged me exactly where I did not want to go. I’d like to thank you all as there is no way I’d be able to complete this suicide without you. It is with great regret and joy that I, Meander Maddox, have decided to light myself on fire in the city square. The world was taken from me in shades, like a too-wet watercolor smearing and lightening until the shape it held has melted. I offer my body as a tribute to this city and know that as the smoke worms its way into my lungs, I will have one last sliver of fresh air, and it will fit as tight and sharp into my mouth as a fishhook, making me remember the joys I now forfeit: the useless afternoon, the warm breeze, and the unending search for the mediocre miracle.

Headshot of Willie DavisWillie Davis, a native of Whitesburg, Kentucky, is the winner of the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize.  His fiction has appeared in The Guardian, The Kenyon Review, StorySouth, Hidden City Quarterly, and several other places. He is currently a fellow of the Kentucky Arts Council.

Image credit: Stuart Howe on Flickr

SPRING FLIGHT by Larry Eby

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Couple holding hands in a field

SPRING FLIGHT
by Larry Eby

We ran through several fields together, the dandelions grasping at the soil as our speed caught them, a hundred crows flapping behind us, trying to keep up. Between each field we would leap: a street. a river. a parking garage. During the dark hours, we climbed into convenience store windows, your dress catching and tearing on the broken glass, and rummaged around before the light broke through and people—everywhere—spoke of us like we were crazy children, which is what we were and what we wanted to be and what the world was asking of us.

Summer, our feet were bare and blistering in the shallow waters as we rested on the bank of a pond, and you told me this was what you wanted of me: a man in line at the grocery store, awake but day dreaming out the filmy storefront, passed the painted 50% off sign, imagining what we were doing now—swimming together, holding each other, waiting for someone to catch us. The noon sun made your teeth glisten, your neck bright, and I couldn’t grasp what you meant when you told me you had to leave.

Headshot of Larry EbyLarry Eby is the author of two books of poetry, Flight of August, winner of the 2014 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and Machinist in the Snow, ELJ Publications 2015. His work can be found in Forklift, Passages North, Fourteen Hills, Thrush Poetry Journal, and others. He is the editor in chief of Orange Monkey Publishing, a poetry press in California. His poem “Thundersnow” appears in Issue No. 12 of Cleaver. “Flight of August” appears in Issue 1.

NIGHT OWL by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol

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Spotted owl with bright orange eyes

NIGHT OWL
by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol

Nuit Blanche

I once loved a man who was a creature of the night. Like me, but more so. He slept through most of the daylight hours, his wily hair a halo on his satin pillowcase. Sometimes I stopped by his room between classes to curl up next to him and feel his dreaming body register mine.

One night, before our bodies had ever laid beside each other, before I’d ever run my fingers through his curls, before I saw that pair of women’s shoes outside his bedroom door, before I tried to push the door open and found it locked, we shared an email exchange that ended with this message: “Meet me at the memorial in fifteen minutes.” It was four in the morning when we stumbled down the hill and across the football fields, into the dark forest where even the crickets slept.

The crisp fall air kept us close. Half-bare trees guided our path until thicket gave way to moon-soaked pasture. He dug a joint out of his pocket, and we found a log where we sat, huddled close to the heat, watching stars streak across the silty sky, silent bursts of light in the still dawn. The grass glowed white with frozen dew; in a few hours, the ice crystals would seep down their spines, leaving the meadow withered with frostbite.

◊

Kin

I ride out of the forest just in time to see a winged one swoop down, out of the sunset sky, and land on a fence post, wood dark with rot. It’s big, that’s all I know, even when its cloak settles like wood shavings beneath a carpenter’s steady hand.

I dismount my bike and step gingerly, holding my inhale like a little girl holds a spiny rose. But my gears squeak, a leaf crunches underfoot, and, quick as lightning, there is a swivel of the head. Two eyes glare at me, black beads mended into a mask made of shadows.

I freeze mid-step, heart batting against ribs beneath its pointed gaze. We stand eye-to-eye, two wild creatures caught in the last wrinkles of twilight.

Some believe owls are a bad omen, the keepers of the underworld.

After a century of silence, this one has deemed me the untrustworthy one. Head swivels forward and wings unfold, a curtain of barred feathers. Then flight—to the outstretched arm of a live oak tree where its plumed coat flusters and settles once again.

From its perch, the owl regards me with a stare as I walk my bike down the road toward the park exit. I will keep my head bowed, as if in the presence of royalty, peeking from the corner of my eye at the winged one on high.

◊

Rosebud

If a rainstorm threatens from behind the hills, the firekeepers heap logs onto the flames, a feeding frenzy. The fire can never go out, for this is the engine that powers the prayers of the Sundancers, warriors who have committed to dancing for four days without food or water.

On the third night of the dance, the night of the full moon, I am honored to take my place among the firekeepers. We stand guard around the glowing coals, rakes and shovels in hand, our bare feet covered in ash.

Around three in the morning, we ready ourselves for the real work of the night: heating stones for the morning sweat lodges. With our grandmother moon watching overhead, we build a base of logs on top of the coals. We carry the stones one by one, set them on the wood, and then lay down more logs.

As we work, sweat shimmering on our skin, I notice a woman watching us, a thin silhouette against the ghost white of a teepee. It is Joan, the woman who brought me here; this is her tenth summer dancing. She looks frail in the cold darkness, but I have seen her stamp her feet in the Sundance circle, knees high, arms strong, her gaze never leaving the tree of life at the center of the altar where thousands of prayer ties flutter in the dusty wind.

The next morning, as I help her prepare for her last day of dancing, she describes the scene to me: “It was so beautiful,” she says, “watching the firekeepers do their dance.”

“I know,” I say. “I was there.”

She had no idea.

During the dance, the dancers no longer exist on this earthly plane. For a time, they become part of the spirit world. Watching us work the fire, we could have been anyone, anything. All she knows is that she witnessed something sacred beneath a buffalo moon.

◊

Birdsong

The first time I went to Ted’s house, it was nearing midnight. We walked out to the garden so he could harvest greens for me to take with me.

“You play classical music for your plants?” I asked.

“It’s good for them,” he said, smiling in the darkness, bent over a bed of lettuce. “Makes them happy.”

Ted follows the sun to bed and stirs with the first birdsong—although when I was around, we fought sleep until dawn, twisting the bed sheets until they lay useless in a pile on the floor. When we were spent, he held me in his wood-chopping arms, his body quivering as he released the reigns of consciousness. Outside, frogs sang night songs to their fish-tailed young.

At the end of the summer, I left the patchwork fields of corn and soybean, my duffel bag filled with rogue sage harvested in highway ditches. Back in Florida, classes started and routines returned. I still stayed up late, sharing my bed with half-read books, all sharp edges and smeared ink. My mailbox filled with letters from Ted—poems scribbled on yellow pages from a legal pad, updates on the fall garden. He wrote to me before the sun was up, while watching the birds peck at his many bird feeders. Sometimes there would be a feather folded into the weathered pages—barred owl, goldfinch, speckled woodpecker, cardinal, blue jay, mourning dove.

◊

Ritual

Lying in bed, I stretched my hearing as far as I could, following my mother’s footsteps as she walked between the sink and the fridge or out the front door where she’d stand in front of the Royal Poinciana, a wedding gift from her father, waving water onto green elephant ears and the orange beaks of birds of paradise. Sometimes she’d leave the hose at the feet of the prickly bougainvillea while she tidied up the kitchen.

After the dishes were rinsed and the plants were watered, she moved toward the bedrooms. I could hear her outside my door, walking between her room and the bathroom, switching lights on and off again. Then the click of the bathroom door shutting, a final pull from the inside to make sure it was closed. The squeak of the faucet. The rush of water. It starts off hollow, you know, the sound of water filling a tub. As the water rises, the sound softens until it hits nothing but depth.

Another squeak, then silence.

The quality of this solitude must be different, I imagine. When the kids are asleep in the bedroom, your husband reading on the couch. The cats scattered like slumbering curlicues around the house, the neighbors’ cars resting like moonlit rocks in front of darkened windows.

This time belonged to her alone.

During the day, she was on: on the phone at work, on our backs about homework, on top of this household as best as a working mother can be.

But in the blessed stillness of night, she was weightless.

Headshot of Carmella de los Angeles GuiolCarmella de los Angeles Guiol hangs her hula hoop in South Florida. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Toast, The Normal School, Lunch Ticket, Spry, The Fourth River, and The Inquisitive Eater. You can often find her working in the garden or kayaking the Hillsborough River, but you can always find her writing at www.therestlesswriter.com.

MAY PROCESSION PRACTICE by Timothy Wenzell

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Children sitting in school room; "Saint Joseph and Saint Anne, Room 205, 1960."

MAY PROCESSION PRACTICE
by Timothy Wenzell

Little I stand by William
at the crest of the asphalt hill
looking into the incinerator,
watching the chocolate milk cartons burn while
shaking away my need to piss.

Mother Phoebe has just told the tall boys
at the bottom of the asphalt hill
how to turn like soldiers and
she looks across the ballyard
to the white church
with open doors leading
all the way to Jesus
hanging with His thorny crown over

candles dripping wax hot wax
running down the sides as
my piss leaks
down my trousers like
wax hot wax.

A yellow stream
slithers snakelike
with its foamy head,
gathering momentum downhill
to Sanctuary
between Mother’s feet and
breaking her stare from
those sacred flames.

Chocolate milk cartons burn and burn,
incinerating into black feathers rising
out through the carbon chimney,
out of the inferno.

Mother Phoebe walks
up the yellow river to its source:
Hell comes quickly now
So God puts a Whisper into my ear:
“brush the puddle to William’s leg
and say
‘he pissed sister he pissed sister.’”

But
God in all His Glory can’t hide the wet stain
moonsize on my crotch
staring back at the big blue habit hovering,
a monolith with a silver cross
over me and my piss
and my hands done up in prayer.

Now the voice of God has gone away,
now the cartons have burned to ash,
now I’m just waiting
for the Iron Hand of Mother
(getting ready to come down).

Headshot of Timothy Wenzell Timothy Wenzell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Virginia Union University in Richmond, VA. He is widely published, including a novel, Absent Children, a book on Irish ecocriticism, Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature, and many short stories, poems, and scholarly articles in literary and peer-reviewed journals. Tim grew up and attended Catholic school in the Philly suburbs, and Philadelphia and the Catholic school experience have become sources for his fiction and poetry.

Image credit: Michael 1952 on Flickr

NOBODY PLAYED THE GUITAR IN THE CORNER OF THE LIVING ROOM by Christopher David Rosales

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Head of an acoustic guitar

NOBODY PLAYED THE GUITAR IN THE CORNER OF THE LIVING ROOM
by Christopher David Rosales

Not the husband heating the milk for the baby in the crib. Not the baby in the crib. And not the wife coming in the door from work. The cat didn’t play it. The dog couldn’t play it. The parrot on its perch cawed, “I won’t play the guitar.” The French diplomat didn’t play it. Instead he smoked an e-cigarette beside the fireplace listening to the Spanish ambassador remark, “Nunca tocaré la guitarra.” The stunt man in white rode his motorbike off the balcony before he got his chance to play it. The prostitute and her fiancé leaving out the back window never even asked to play it. The serial killer chose instead to swipe his bloody knife across a painting in the hall, his calling card. Meanwhile the cat-burglar returned to the drawers the jewels he felt guilty about stealing, nestled them among panties. No, neither the maid, the butler, nor the flower-arranger played the guitar, and not even the gardener blowing leaves off the walk. And yet if you touched the guitar in the corner of the living room, you would have felt it hum.

Headshot of Christopher David RosalesChristopher David Rosales’ fiction has appeared in anthologies and journals in the U.S. and abroad. This year Mixer Publishing released his first novel, Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper, which won the McNamara Creative Arts Grant in 2009. He won the Center of the American West’s award for writing from 2008 to 2010. Rosales is the fiction editor for SpringGun Press and is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. His second novel, Gods on the Lam, is forthcoming in 2016 from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. You can reach him at www.christopherrosales.com and @CDRosales.

THE EMPATHY MACHINE, Part Two by Kelly McQuain

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THE EMPATHY MACHINE, Part Two
A Visual Narrative
by Kelly McQuain

[slideshow_deploy id=’22381′]

Read a text version of the essay here.
Find The Empathy Machine, Part One here.

Play the Bee an Artist game!
Surrealism Cards (and a tangible board game!) coming soon.

"Bee An Artist" game board

Click on the game to see it in a higher resolution.

 

Headshot of Kelly McQuainKelly McQuain’s chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won Bloom magazine’s poetry prize. He was a 2015 Fellow at the Lambda Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices and a 2015 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. McQuain has published poetry and prose in Painted Bride Quarterly, Redivider, The Philadelphia Inquirer, A&U, The Pinch and Weave. He has served as a contributing editor to Art & Understanding and The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and his poetry and prose have appeared in numerous anthologies: Between: New Gay Poetry, Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, The Queer South, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, and Best American Erotica. He has worked as a pretzel maker, a comic book artist, and a professor of English. He hosts Poetdelphia, a literary salon in the City of Brotherly Love.  His poem “Jam” appears in Issue No. 1 of Cleaver. Read more at his website.

All images © Kelly McQuain, 2016

 

WHEN THINGS WEAR AWAY OTHER THINGS by Michael Melgaard

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Child standing next to driftwood on a beach

WHEN THINGS WEAR AWAY OTHER THINGS
by Michael Melgaard

Moira played with the ocean, chasing the waves as they pulled back into themselves. Her pink rain boots splashing through the water were the only color on the wet, rocky shore. She turned to her dad and laughed while a wave came in behind her. It covered her feet and was over the top of her boots before she noticed. She watched the water pull away and then looked up at her dad. She started to cry.

David walked over and picked her up. He told her it was okay and just water, then turned her away from the ocean and asked, “Do you see how they built a wall there?” He held her on his hip in the crook of one arm and pulled her boots off with the free hand. She was trying to tell him about her feet being wet between exaggerated sobs. He said, “Over there. Look. Do you know why they would build a wall on the beach?”

She didn’t say anything but did look where he was pointing. David went on, “A long time ago, before they built the wall, there was a graveyard here, where we’re walking.” He dumped the water out of one boot, then the other. “Back then where we’re standing was underground.” He moved her onto his other hip and tugged off her socks. “But the waves eroded the ground away.”

She asked, “What’s ‘eroded’?”

He turned back to the water. “See how every time a wave comes up it pulls some rocks back with it? That’s eroding. It’s when things wear away other things. Eventually, the waves will wear through the wall and wash away the city.”

Moira looked at the wall and then the ocean and then at her dad. She asked, “Really?”

“Yup.” He said, “Hold these,” and handed her the boots. He wrung out her socks as best he could. “Eroding takes a long time, though. Hundreds of years. But anyway, back before the wall was built the waves were eroding the ground, wearing away the graveyard’s dirt, and you know what’s under the dirt in a graveyard?”

“Coffins?”

“That’s right. So all these coffins were getting uncovered and they started floating out to sea. After bad storms the bay would be full of them, like little boats bobbing around in the water.”

“No!”

“It’s true. It was a real problem. And, of course, no one wanted coffins floating around the bay, so they built the wall to keep them in.”

David pulled Moira’s socks and boots back on and dropped her on the ground. She went up to the wall and asked her dad, “Really?” He nodded. She ran her hand along the wall. It was pitted and rough, small rocks stuck out where the concrete had been worn away around them. She grabbed one of the rocks and pulled. It came off in her hand.

“See,” David said. “Just like the coffins.”

She held it up close to her face. When she went to show her dad, he was staring up the beach. He said, “We better catch up with your mother.”

Katherine was far enough ahead that he could only see her outline against the rocks. It looked impatient. Moira didn’t want to go. She whined and planted herself on the ground. David said, “Bye, have fun,” and walked away. She ran to catch up. But once she was with him she climbed up on the driftwood logs piled at the high tide line and started walking along them, hopping from one to the next. David asked, “Could you please try to hurry a bit?”

She said, “I can’t put my feet down because of the lava!”

“We don’t have time for that.”

Moira kept going on the logs until she got to the end of one that was too far from the next. She stopped and said, “Help, Dad, the lava.” David went back and bent down in front of her. She climbed onto his back and they headed toward her mother.

Katherine put out her cigarette when they got close. She said to David, “You took your time.”

“I didn’t realize you got so far ahead.”

And Moira said, “Dad told me that the ocean took the coffins out to the sea because of eroding and all the coffins floated away.”

“Why would you tell her about that?”

David put Moira on the ground and crouched down in front of her. He said, “See, I told you it was true.” Katherine tilted her head to one side and gave David her are-you-fucking-kidding-me look. He smiled at Moira, then tickled her and said, “Let’s build a sandcastle!”

She looked around the rocky beach and said, “There’s no sand.”

“Then we’ll just have to make do with what we have.”

David pulled a driftwood stick out of a tangle of seaweed and wood and tossed it on the ground. He found another that was the same length and threw it on top. Then another. Moira asked what he was doing, and he shrugged and kept pulling out sticks, breaking long ones so they were all the same length. Once he had a pile, he carried them down to a flat part of the beach and started driving them into the ground. When Moira saw they were going to make a circle, she said, “It’s a wall!”

“You got it. Can you grab me some more wood? Like this.” He showed her a stick. She concentrated on it, and then ran over to her mom, grabbed her hand, and told her to come help.

She was back a few minutes later with an armful of all-too-short sticks. She dropped them off and left to find more. Then Katherine was there with her own load. She added them to the pile and didn’t leave. David focused on making sure one stick was in the ground right but eventually had to turn around to get another. Katherine was staring down at him. He smiled at her. She said, “You think it’s funny?”

He shook his head and drove another stick into the ground. “This is ridiculous. You’re mad at me because you walked ahead of us?”

“I’m mad because this was supposed to be a day of us all together and you kept her with you.”

“We were having fun and you didn’t stop.”

“What do you get out of this?”

David said, “Almost done,” to Moira, who was coming up behind Katherine with more sticks. Katherine rolled her eyes at David and then walked over to a driftwood log to sit. Moira and David finished the wall. He stood up and waved a hand over it, “Behold, my queen, your ramparts are complete.”

Moira looked it over and said, “There’s no roof.”

“But there will be. And a moat. And a drawbridge. It will be the finest sandcastle ever created!”

“Daa-aad. It’s not made of sand.”

“Neither are sandwiches, but we eat them anyways.”

“You’re silly.”

“That seems to be the consensus around here.”

“What’s ‘consensus’?”

“Consensus is when everyone thinks I’m silly.”

David started digging a moat with a flat piece of wood. Every scoop out made more pebbles and rocks fall back in. The best he could manage was a shallow, wide ditch. While he worked, Moira leaned sticks up against the wall, trying to fill in the gaps. Katherine smoked and looked out over the ocean. Moira got bored with trying to fix the wall and started waving around one of the sticks, commanding David to work faster in a voice that was meant to sound like a queen. David played along, groveling and shoveling faster. Once the moat was as good as it was going to get, he said, “My queen, I’m going to find a roof.”

Up the beach he found some rope tangled up with some driftwood. He pulled it out, but there wasn’t enough with which to do anything. There were some old planks and what looked like a palette, and then, a little farther along, he found a piece of plywood. He lifted one edge off the ground and gave the crabs time to find new shelter. It was waterlogged and heavy, and he had trouble getting a good grip. He took a lot of breaks dragging it back.

He saw that Katherine had left her log. She was crouched on the ground by the castle, and Moira was running around picking things up. Moira held something out to Katherine, and they both laughed. By the time David got back to them, they were both sitting on the ground. He said, “A roof for your castle, your highness.”

Moira said, “Look, we made a garden.” They had arranged pieces of shell and wave-worn glass in spiral patterns all around the entrance to the castle. There was a little path too, and small twigs stood upright with seaweed wrapped around the tops. “Those are trees,” she explained. “Mom made them.”

David said, “That’s very clever.”

He lifted the plywood over top of the wall and let it down slowly. The castle shifted a bit to the left. Katherine got up and wiped the pebbles off her pants, and David found a few large rocks to prop up the side that seemed most likely to give out. He stood back and admired their work. Moira was focused on her garden. He said, “Nothing left to do but move in,” and crawled in through the little opening.

He tried to sit down without knocking the whole castle over. Moira gave up on the garden and followed him in. David had to pull up his knees to under his chin so there was room. He said, “I think it’s nicer from the outside.”

Moira had just enough space to stand. She said, “I like it.”

“I’m not saying it’s bad. I just wouldn’t want to spend the night here.”

“It’d be cold.”

“Very.”

“We could make it better.”

“I don’t know. It’s getting pretty late.”

“Tomorrow?”

“It probably won’t be here tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

“It will be washed away by then.”

“Why?”

“It’s like the graveyard. It will get eroded away by the waves when the tide comes in tonight.”

She thought about that. David stretched his legs and rubbed his lower back. Sand sprinkled down from the ceiling. Through a crack in the wall he saw a freighter passing by on the horizon. The water had darkened to the same color as the clouds. The ship looked like it was cutting through the air. Moira asked, “Can we stop it?”

David took a moment to realize she was talking about the erosion, not the freighter. “I don’t think so. We’d need to reinforce it with something. Concrete maybe. Do you have any concrete?” She shook her head. “Then I think we’re out of luck.”

Moira sat down across from her dad. Their knees touched. She shivered, and David pulled her around so she was sitting on his lap. He rubbed her shoulders.

Outside, Katherine said, “We should get going.” Moira said no, and Katherine said, “Come on, it’s getting cold out.” Moira said no again, and David didn’t say anything. Katherine stared at the castle. She said, “Five minutes,” then sat back down and lit a cigarette.

David kissed the top of Moira’s head. She shivered, and he wrapped his arms around her, and they listened to the waves drag the beach into the sea.

Headshot of Michael MelgaardMichael Melgaard is a freelance writer and an editor at an independently owned Canadian publishing house. He has contributed to several print and online publications, including Potluck Magazine, The Torontoist, and the Maple Tree Literary Supplement. He lives in Toronto.

Image credit: Paul & Hien Brown on Flickr

BLUE: SMOKE: COTTON: TEETH: CAT: JELLY: BLOW by Anne Panning

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Pack of opened HOPE cigarettes

 

BLUE: SMOKE: COTTON: TEETH: CAT: JELLY: BLOW
by Anne Panning

I rarely wear blue, but today there’s a striped dress the color of rain in my closet. It’s a pullover. I can hardly stand how good it feels against my bare knees, walking.

When I lived in the Philippines, I became a party smoker. The cigarettes were menthol, loosely packed. The brand was called Hope. I quit.

My sister works at a fireworks factory. She has to wear all cotton clothing, right down to the underwear. When I ask her what she does all day, she says, “The usual.”

One of my teeth, one of my front teeth, is porcelain. A clay animation artist made it. The dentist said to me, “Be careful. It’s like china. It can break.”

I got a dog instead of a cat because I know a cat could eat me. My dog is part poodle and not very smart. When the groomer ties holiday ribbons around her neck and sends her home smelling like oatmeal, our whole family applauds.

Last night I dreamed my dead father was lying in bed, drunk, his hands covered in bright red raspberry jelly.

Every night I sleep with two fans blowing madly through my bedroom: a box and an oscillating. The air is chilled and hard and loud. When I turn them off in the morning, it’s a terrible silence.

Anne Panning author photoAnne Panning has published a novel, Butter, as well as a short story collection, Super America, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She has also published short work in places such as Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The Florida Review, Passages North,  Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kalliope, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, The Laurel Review, Five Points, River Teeth, Cimarron Review, West Branch, and Brevity (4x). Four of her essays have received notable citations in The Best American Essays series. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.

 

Image credit: Wikipedia 

GRANNY AND THE BONEHEAD SQUAD by Maria Pinto

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Black and white baby doll head

GRANNY AND THE BONEHEAD SQUAD
by Maria Pinto

My grandboy, Ricky, actually comes over nowadays, ever since that stupid show. He’s been here every day this week, drinking all the juice in my fridge straight from the carton. He’s so proud of me, or at least as proud as a preteen can be of his grandmother. I mean I wasn’t on the show, but Alexia the reborn was. Ricky couldn’t be bothered with old Mema before, but then Mema got herself tangled up with the Music Television. I’ll take it, I suppose. Beggars and choosers and that.

After he accepted my hugs and kisses with minimal protest, I let him have the run of the house while I holed up in my studio, adding dimples to Ruthie’s knees. I can hear him in the kitchen now. He’s chugging my cranapple like a diabetic, cussing and fussing with Roland Nielson’s kid. Yes, the same Roland Nielson’s kid who shaved Marylou Crain’s mini-poodle and wrote a filthy word that rhymes with “Bundt” on the poor thing’s side in permanent marker, two summers gone. The same kid who has done worse besides—his worst, as we know it, involving firecrackers and the deaths of a whole heap of lizards this past Fourth of July. I remember a smell like chicken over that particular field as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played nearby. Made me hungry even as it made me sick. The boy won’t stop till he’s tried as an adult, I swear.

Ricky’s mother has already tried and failed to keep Ricky away from The Devil Jr., so I know there’s no use in my making an attempt.

Best I can do is keep an eye, right? My eyes and ears may have seen and heard the events of umpteen Sundays, but they still work as good as they did when I was a seedling. The ears in particular perk up when they hear, from the kitchen:

“Holy shit, that thing’s creepy! Like, that’s the most insane thing I’ve ever seen.”

Ricky must have just showed the Nielson boy Alexia, whom I lent to Ricky when he promised he could be gentle with her. I handed her over like I would have handed over any bun fresh from the oven. It put a twinge in my heart to see him cradle the doll with such exaggerated care, even if he was doing it to mock me. With her tawny head in the crook of his elbow, he’d looked up at me and asked, “If this baby doll is so precious, why’d you hire her out to The Bonehead Squad and let them do donuts at the Smart Mart with her on top of a car?”

“Oh, is that what they did?” I pretended to wonder. “I didn’t see the episode. Aileen will be over later with her laptop to show it to me, if I can stomach the sight.”

I know I didn’t answer his question about lending Alexia to a prank show, but he didn’t wait for an answer, anyhow, just rolled his eyes and left the room.

My reasons are actually quite simple. When the fellows from The Bonehead Squad came to my page at Rebornangels.com, saying they would be in the area soon and wanted to “rent my Alexia model” (as if there were more than one of her), I offered them Janie or Sue instead. But they wanted Alexia specifically and were willing to pay me a ridiculous sum for “the privilege of her company.” Go figure that. I was hesitant, but I gave it all a good think. The money they sent my way will let my daughter go back to school next year, like she wants to. She doesn’t know I can help her yet. I want to surprise her with the check. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d passed up the opportunity to support Lizzie, since she doesn’t pull in much income waiting tables. Mark barely makes enough to keep them in cola, bless his heart. Lizzie accepts little gifts from me now and again, if grudgingly. Except, of course, for the time I tried to give her Alexia.

Now, in the kitchen, Ricky is saying, “Dude, this is definitely the one. See, you can tell, it even has road rash on its face! I told my grandma not to fix it but she says she has to.”

“I still don’t buy it, man. So you have a real-looking dolly, big whoop. I’ll ask Greg if he DVRed the episode and we can put this thing next to his giant screen to compare. I’m pretty sure the fake baby they used wasn’t a beaner, though.”

This wasn’t the first time someone had made a peanut gallery reference to Alexia’s skin and features. When I first made Alexia, thirteen years ago this December (has it really been that long?), Aileen had run off at the mouth as well. She put it different, declaring there was “something a little on the American Indian side” about the eyes and coloration, and “did I mean to make a nonwhite doll.” At the time, I simply said that “yes, I meant every wrinkle, every pigment and every fine black hair on her sweet head.”

What I’d wanted to say was something far from kind about her project, which was looking more like the Elephant Man than a preemie. I don’t mind the noise of my own horn when I say that even though Aileen and I started making lifelike baby dolls at the same time, I surpassed her in skill quickly. My babies get adopted at three times the rate and many times the price that hers do. People smash open car windows to save my babies from boiling in their own sweat in parking lots. To my knowledge, nothing has ever been damaged or destroyed in the name of protecting one of Aileen’s babies, but everyone’s got their own reborn journey.

And it makes all the sense God has to spare that my most realistic reborn would look a little “Indian” around the eyes. The whole town, save me and the midwife, was in the dark about who was responsible for the swell of Lizzie’s belly. But if God hadn’t taken that child for an angel too soon, the girl would now be a year and two months older than Ricky, with a Mexican surname.

“I wonder if it has a vag,” that awful Nielson boy is saying, and I’m about to quit my workshop desk to go retrieve Alexia when the gravel on the front drive crunches under familiar tires. Ricky’s mother is here. You can tell because Mark knows not to drive that fast toward a civilized residence. And he listens to the tinny country/western station out of Jamestown, not that screaming heavy metal stuff we always fought about when Lizzie was a raccoon-eyed teenager living under this very roof.

I am in such a panic to get out and grab Alexia before Lizzie has a chance to see her that I knock over some turpentine as I get up. Shoot! Then a jar of watchful baby blue eyes spills into the mess. Shoot, shoot, shoot! Each cornea looks up at me like an accusation. The turpentine will ruin my baby-in-progress if I don’t mop up the spill, but as I do so, I hear from the kitchen:

“Mom, what the hell! Mom!” This is the sound of a boy with his ear in the makeshift vise an angry mother can create between pointer and thumb. Lizzie learned this pinch from me.

“What’d I tell you about sneaking off with this creep? Huh? What are you two, star-crossed lovers? Oh, are you playing house now? If you don’t get your ass in that tru…”

This trailing off is the sound of my daughter not believing her eyes. I get why she’d be angry, I do. She let me know a long time ago that the sight of Alexia makes her madder than a hornet. There are things we do in love that make our children think we hate them.

I’ve got enough of the turpentine mopped that I can leave the rest for later. I open the door to my workshop on this scene unfolding in the kitchen:

Lizzie is grabbing Alexia, her jaw tight with anger, holding the doll upside down by those pudgy vinyl legs that look so much like God-made flesh. Every doll I’d made prior to Alexia had been practice, I thought, for the real work my hands were called to do. I’d heard from the grieving almost-mothers on my forums that a reborn could help with the process, but Lizzie wrote me off as a sicko when I suggested as much. She has always loathed my hobby.

Neither did she want a reminder of the life she’d almost had with Juan. She says their time together was a mistake, that the loss of his child was a warning. But that just doesn’t feel right to me. Her dimpled smile was constant back then. Even though she felt the need to carry on with Juan in secret, Lizzie was never so well adjusted as when the promise of a life with him lay maturing in her belly.

Sure, it annoyed her when he called me “moms,” but I thought that was because she couldn’t stand the thought of me in the plural. It only came to me later that she might be ashamed to claim Juan in public. But it couldn’t be true. My stone-tough daughter would never be shy about loving whomever she loved in this world, busybodies be damned. Or maybe I failed her in that regard.

And then came that bleak day in the delivery room, and the umbilical noose, and the resulting depression. Then came the affair with Mark, and Juan’s roaring exit from town. Mark still has a scar above his eyebrow from that day. I’d hoped Alexia could contain the ghost of her nameless flesh-and-blood counterpart, so that she could be put to rest, someday. What a fool I’d been.

Now, in the kitchen, Lizzie is shoving her son away as he goes to grab the doll back. Lizzie is shouting, “I told that woman to lock this thing up somewhere ages ago, and what does she do? Puts it on TV and then lets my son play with it.”

Lizzie is turning on the stove. I could wrestle my Lexie from her grip if I moved quickly enough, but she’s already got that precious left foot in the flame.

I remember how hard it was to lacquer Alexia’s toenails to make them look glossy but unpainted. Sleek, but true.

The kitchen is filling up with the rank smell of burning vinyl. The smoke is not safe to breathe, but Lizzie doesn’t care; she’s got the effigy lit and is on the move through the back door. The Nielson boy is recording a video on his phone and saying, “I think I just fell in love with your mother, dude,” as we all follow her into the backyard.

Now she’s saying, “I don’t know what kind of weird shit you’re up to right now, Mom, but leave Ricky out of it, okay?”

She is lighting the old barbecue grill Mark brought over at the start of the summer and putting Alexia over the flames to finish the job. Then Ricky says, “Mom,” in a small, plaintive voice, the likes of which is rarely heard from a male child, and instead of looking at him where he stands beside her, she is looking at me on my back step, where I’m hugging myself despite the heat. She is looking me in the face, and seeing something there that must have stayed her hand all these years, what it is I still don’t know, and pulling Alexia back off the grill, flinging the charred brown body back to me, so that it lands unreal and wrong at my feet. She is shaking and crying, but in a fierce way that doesn’t want to be consoled. As she takes Ricky by the arm and leads him down the driveway to the truck, the Nielson boy following behind, still recording, the sound of cicadas warbling in the close, pre-rain air, she is asking, repeatedly:

“How could you?”

She could be asking that of anyone present, including a whole crowd of ghosts.

 

Maria Pinto author photoMaria Pinto was born in Jamaica and grew up in south Florida. Her recent work has appeared or will appear in Word Riot, Bartleby Snopes, The Butter, Pinball, The Missing Slate, FLAPPERHOUSE, Small Po[r]tions, 100 Word Story, and Literary Orphans, among others. She was the 2010 Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, in the city where she lives and does karaoke. Her debut novel is in search of a home. She’s working on the next.

Image credit: traaf on Flickr

BOUNTY HUNTING by Karen Levy

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Roll of 100 dollar bills

BOUNTY HUNTING
by Karen Levy

She pulled up behind the others who’d just arrived and were piling out of their car, laughing.

That was a long drive.

Together, they walked toward the house. They all laughed except for her; she was very angry at her brother-in-law.

There was a fishing boat out front. A sign led them away from the front door, to a backyard office, where a sunburnt man waved them in.

Joe, he said.

Nice tan, Joe, someone said, and the others laughed.

From fishin’, he said. He was a big man but he said it light and breezy.

She thought he looked like a cop. She’d heard that her brother-in-law had been caught by undercover cops.

Everyone laughed.

They barely fit into the office; there were eight of them, all related through blood or marriage.

So who’s putting up the money? Joe asked. He was big behind the desk. She stepped forward, along with two others.

One of them, in a low-cut dress, said, I’m not married anymore, and smiled at Joe, and nodded at her ex who stood in the doorway.

It’ll still cost you, Joe said, flirting back.

Everyone laughed.

They laid out ten thousand dollars. Joe gave them forms to fill out.

She wondered if the others had known all along. She wondered if she was the only one who was surprised. No one else seemed to be taking this very seriously.

A cousin spoke loudly about unimportant things.

It was a lot of money.

Everyone laughed.

She looked at the walls. There were photos of Joe with other big men, their arms folded across their chests. All wore handcuffs on their belts. Bounty hunters.

Everyone was talking now. No one else noticed the photos of the men who hunted other men down.

When all the paperwork was complete, Joe reminded them of the weight of their commitment. He was a big man. Her brother-in-law was slim and had a wonderful smile.

One hundred thousand dollars if he runs off.

Everyone was suddenly quiet.

Do any of you have any doubts? If you do, you can back out now.

No one laughed.

She could tell that they all had their doubts, too—

You, he said, looking at her. You’re the only one not laughing.

—but they were family. They were here to make things better, to soften the edges, to live happily in the moment.

That’s all they had, after all, the moment and their family.

So she laughed.

Karen Levy author photoKaren Levy is a writer and storyteller who lives and performs her work in New York City and Santo Domingo, DR. Her short stories have been published in Network Magazine, Icarus Down, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She is currently seeking representation for her novel, The Story You Choose to Tell, set in the Dominican Republic.

EMU ON THE LOOSE by Thaddeus Rutkowski

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Emu

EMU ON THE LOOSE
by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Not much was happening at the artists’ retreat (people were hiding in their studios; maybe they were working; maybe they were drinking) until the emu arrived. We didn’t know where it came from; no one came with it. Wherever it had been, it hadn’t been missed. It was a tall bird, between five and six feet from toe to head, and it was in no hurry. It ambled past the barn complex and stood on the dirt road. Those who saw it from their studios left their writing (or their drinking) and came out for a closer look. The bird wasn’t afraid. It stood and stared at whoever approached. It didn’t need to use its legs to kick—no one came close enough to threaten it.

Someone had the idea of corralling it in a pasture. There was a way to herd the bird; you flapped your arms and blocked its path. It had to walk away from you. The emu was led through a gate into a fenced field. It didn’t try to escape. It stood there in the tall grass and stared. Its eyes were intense in its triangular head. If it wanted to, it could jump the fence or tear the wire mesh apart with its claws.

Someone brought it food and set the dish on the ground near the gate, but the bird wasn’t interested. What did emus eat? Probably something more natural, something more alive than what was in the dish. Something that wriggled or flew.

We left the creature in the pasture and gathered for our own dinner.

“What was it?” someone asked. “An ostrich?”

“An emu,” someone else answered.

“Is it wild?”

“Does it look wild?”

“Is it dangerous?”

“It looks lost.”

The next morning the bird was still with us, but it wasn’t in the pasture. It was on the road that led to the studios. It was calm; it almost invited stroking, like a horse. The resident horses could be approached with an open hand. But the bird was too alien, its neck too stalk-like, to touch. At the sight, some of the artists were inspired to do creative work. Some wrote poems about the emu. Others planned installations that went beyond words. Still others ignored the bird.

After a couple of days, the emu disappeared. It probably went back to wherever it came from—a nest on the ground or a stable of emus. Less likely, it went on to the next human settlement, where it could stare at the inhabitants undisturbed.

Thaddeus Rutkowski author photoThaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the books Violent Outbursts, Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse. Haywire won the Members’ Choice Award, given by the Asian American Writers Workshop. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York. He received a fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

A PRESENCE IN WOOD Wood Sculpture by Miriam Carpenter

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A PRESENCE IN WOOD
Wood Sculpture
by Miriam Carpenter
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Throughout my life I have sought the companionship of trees, and have developed an ever deepening reverence for them. Trees are intelligent, resilient, majestic, and adaptable. When a tree has reached the end of its life, the shadow of what once was presents another gift in the form of a satiny, warm, sensual material.

Each piece of wood has its own story—reflections of moments specific to place and time within the architecture of a species. Each tree has its own experience and characteristics uniquely formed by its geographical location, the effects of the seasons, wind, rain, and what grew beside it. The history of each year is physically recorded in each ring slowly reacting to external and internal stresses after it has died and been cut into lumber. Reading this story in the grain is just as exciting to me as transforming it into an artifact. The more time I spend with each piece of wood, the deeper my understanding grows. Respecting its capacity and understanding its potential, I can be more thoughtful in how I bring the piece to completion.

Everything that I create is an experiment. Whether the approach is multi-axis split turning, bending, or carving by hand, it is always an exploration of the material’s unique potential.
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My current passion is fueled by an evolving series of delicately carved wooden feathers. Species with the most porous early wood, tight growth rings, and strong medullary rays provide the type of structure I have found to be most resilient. The dense medullary rays project radially through the rings, offering an ability to shape incredibly thin undulating forms that expose the delicate pores, while the tight rings offer a dramatic visual texture through varying densities.

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My process is of making—of staying present in the moment, of focus and flexibility—and is an ongoing lesson in non-attachment. As I work, I allow myself to pour out love with such intensity that what I create becomes embodied with a life that is viscerally connected to me. I do not believe that handmade artifacts are simply objects or things; I believe they are imbued with heart and soul. Our energy passes through us and into what we are making. Bliss, anxieties—these things are reflected in what we produce. We exchange matter. When we create a baby, far along in its gestation, its DNA floods the mother’s body. When a baby is born, some of its DNA remains in the mother’s body forever. There is a constant exchange in whatever we create, and being mindful and deliberate about how we do what we do is of utmost importance to how we share our gifts and our lives with everyone and everything around us.

Living creatively shifts the way I move through the world and expands my perceptions. The inclination to create art sets us apart from other living things on this earth. It is an active universal language that creates ties, discovers compatibility, and allows us to realize connections. While creating ties, my hope is to evoke something in others that might broaden understanding and help perpetuate a passion to learn, nurture, respect, and explore.

Miriam Carpenter author photoMiriam Carpenter is an artist, researcher, and designer based in New Hope, Pennsylvania. After graduating from RISD in 2006, she designed furniture alongside Mira Nakashima for seven years. In 2014, she was awarded the Windgate ITE Residency sponsored by the Center for Art in Wood together with four wood artists from Japan, Canada, West Ghana, and the United States. The year following, she lived, worked, and studied with furniture makers, sculptors, scholars, and environmental stewards in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. She is currently working as an independent artist while enjoying teaching across the country.

 

Author photo credit: Amber Johnston

The sculptures:

Bliss, 2014, Turned and carved bleached Ash. Finished with whitewash and 4″ liming wax. 4″ x 9″
Concentra, 2008, Turned and carved Mahogany. 4″ x 13″
Feather 11,903, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 2″ x .875″
Feather 11,902, 2012, Hand-carved Silky Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .5″ x 1.5″ x 4″
Feather 11,901, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 1.75″ x .875″
Feather 11,900, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4″ x 1.875″ x 1.25″
Feather 11,899, 2013, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 1″ x 1.25″ x 3″
Feather 11,898, 2013, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. Holly box. .75″ x 1.25″ x 3″
Feather 11,892, 2014, Hand-carved White Oak endgrain. Steam-bent Wenge spine. Pyrographed and dyed. 1.75″ x 2″ x 2.5″
Feather 11,889, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .625″ x 2″ x 3.75″
Feather 11,888, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .75″ x1.5″ x 4″
Feather 11,887, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 1.25″ x 2.375″ x 4.25″
Feather 11,886, 2013, Hand-carved Wenge. Finished with wax. 7.5″ x 2″ x 3.75″
Feather 11,883, 2016, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 2.25″ x 1.25″
Sisters, 2014, Multi-axis split-turned and carved Basswood frame, finished with India Ink and burnished with beeswax. Mirror glass backed with Dacron and wool. 25.5″ x 18″ x 1.75

PROPHET by Odelia Fried

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Painting of woman holding up tambourine

PROPHET
by Odelia Fried

PROPHET
[prof-et]

Definition:

  1. It’s bloody knuckles and skinned knees, it’s heaven’s fever slicing through the black with open jaws. It’s finding a swarm of locusts dead on your back porch, stuck to the screen door and crushed into the wood slats. It’s curling into bed, into not-sleep, because in sleep comes the Dreams, and with the Dreams comes the People, and with the People comes the End. It’s red-rimmed eyes and violently fluttering fingers. It’s painting the rocks with your blood, Hashem hu ha’Elokim, Hashem hu ha’Elokim, Hashem hu ha’Elokim.
  1. When you were a child, you dreamed of meeting angel, all soft white halo and fluttering wings. The angels God sends to you in your dreams are nothing like this. They do not emanate a gentle glow and they do not have kindly blue eyes. They are knife-like wings and sharp directions, they lightning-strike fear into your heart, prophecy into your veins.
  1. You are named God’s vessel. God’s words are impaled in your ribs like a sword. His holiness rattles your bones.

 

Odelia Fried author photoOdelia Fried is a student, actor, and poet based in New York. Her written work can be seen in various literary magazines and her spoken word can be heard at UrbanWordNYC and at open mics across the city. She is interested in femininity, Judaism, and queer identity, and the intersections between the three. 

Image credit: “Miriam” by Anslem Feuerbach, 1862

COCKCROW by Tyler Kline

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Young boy in forest

COCKCROW
by Tyler Kline

Moment: a mother inks the scythe
above her daughter’s breast, a tail
of bonfire licking a skein of braid.
Moment: tractors rake light from crows
and a goat blinks to count a storm.
Moment knives are slid into boots
like lures crossing a tiger-eye lake,
moment hands covered in bees
are pulled into light shaking honey.
Moment: scapes are tied to a gourd,
moment the gourd is hollowed
until thirsty like a drum. Moment
the boy asks which is his mother,
the banjo or storm. Moment the boy
eclipses whatever tower he can find.
Moment: nothing has its name except
straw-paper sun, moment the boy
looks to the sky and begs for another.

Tyler Kline author photo

Tyler Kline is the author of the forthcoming chapbook As Men Do Around Knives (ELJ Publications, 2016). His recent work is forthcoming in BOAAT, the minnesota review, Spoon River Poetry Review, THRUSH, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Whiskey Island. He is a senior at the University of Delaware and the current Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Find him online at tylerklinepoetry.com. 

Image credit: CIA DE FOTO on Flickr

POT OF GOLD by Tina Barr

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Mountains and fields with rainbow cutting through clouds

POT OF GOLD
by Tina Barr

Stings stitching under the skin, bristles,
like thoughts that roil, like brambles’
thorns that catch at my pants, scrape
bar pins of blood on my forearms.
Lindy says not to touch the nettles;
when they hit hot water, they’ll lose
their sting, but not before, so I shake
them into the boiling. When I go
to taste them though, two small yellow
worms curl in the spoon’s harbor.
Lindy and Ed didn’t tell us they didn’t
have clear title, hadn’t paid their taxes,
so the land we bought is delinquent,
up for grabs. Late, the trees thrash.
I want to set fire to their trailer, want to
bait their place with honey, so bears will
tear their cars open like sardine tins.
I line up people like toy soldiers, whose
carelessness is never personal, the way
poison ivy grows, twines, glossy, reefs
the woods. Foxglove multiplies, its high
combs flowering into apartments for bees,
but in a tea, a poison to serve to Lindy.
Brown recluse scare me the most;
the bites go necrotic. Late in the day
a double rainbow melts its colors away.

 

Tina Barr author photoTina Barr’s five volumes of poetry include Kaleidoscope (Iris Press, April 2015), The Gathering Eye, (Tupelo Press Editor’s Prize) and three chapbooks, all winners of national chapbook competitions. Her fellowships include the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The MacDowell Colony & Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Journal publications include The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, New South, Witness, The Antioch Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Hotel Amerika and The Mississippi Review.

 

Image credit: Grant Eaton on Flickr

THE SCORPION by Erika Dane Kielsgard

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blue-black scorpion

THE SCORPION
by Erika Dane Kielsgard

We tear her limbs to divide our fear.
Her mangled segments reflect
hell mouths in mortal eyes.
She does not inspire the sacred.
Adorned with a swarm of insects,
her myth is a mask for history.
Her claws do not grasp
haphazard or hapless.
Do not let her slip
through your fingers
while your iris clings
to the muse invoked:
a stagnant self-portrait
in a shallow pool,
a shower of pearls
she likens to foam.
The scorpion is an ocean,
the context of a wave.
She sheds her skin seven times
before devouring the dawn,
carrying within her abdomen
small heavens, the eternal call.

Erica Dane Kielsgard author photoErika Dane Kielsgard is an emerging artist who received her BA in Psychology from George Mason University, where she wrote her award-winning research proposal, “Poetry and Journaling Therapy in PTSD” (2013). Her art was selected for exhibit in Fall for the Book’s “Call and Response” (2013, 2014). In her free time, Erika sings and raises arthropods. Her poetry has appeared in Rust + Moth (Autumn 2015) and is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet (Spring 2016, Issue 7.1).

THE LOVE NOTE by Svetlana Beggs

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Crumpled paper with scribbled pink heart

THE LOVE NOTE
by Svetlana Beggs

In 1988, when our city was still called Leningrad and kids wore red (always wrinkled) Young Pioneers’ scarves, my friend Natasha developed a crush on Yura, the tallest boy in 6th grade. She blushed whenever he walked near her, causing us to start feeding Natasha’s backpack tiny love notes bearing Yura’s forged cursive. I was the designated forger, Lida was the writer, and Polina the spy, but we jokingly called her “The Assassin.” In two months we published seven short notes and made five prank calls to Natasha’s flat, releasing Lida’s “deeply meaningful silence.” Around this time, Natasha began to apply her sister’s eyeliner in the school’s bathroom, and we told her honestly that her new look was “amazingly alluring,” even though Yura’s friends now called her “The Vampire.” She would walk into the classroom holding the backpack over her breasts, and the boys would say, “Hide from the Vampire!” and Yura would chuckle because he wanted to continue being friends with these boys.

One day, Elena Nikolaevna, our fear-and-trembling-inducing algebra teacher we all called “The Guillotine,” pried a draft of our love note from Lida’s fist and mercilessly unfolded the crumpled piece of paper. Everyone grew quiet from the effort of suppressing curiosity while showing overt dislike of The Guillotine. And then she started reading the note (omitting Yura’s name, thank God), her voice rich with enjoyment because she was delivering the pleasure a lot of students craved while simultaneously showing everyone her whip. The Guillotine had a way of making things sour and unappetizing, saying, for example, “comradeship” instead of “friendship,” or “it is in your interest,” when she clearly had her own interest in mind. In her voice our note no longer felt like a clumsy first draft—it sounded sinister, as if written by a creepy stalker: “…When you walk home tonight, turn around five times and you might see me…”

Right then, when she read “you might see me,” I saw Yura stand up and heard him say, quite loud, “I demand that you stop it.” The Guillotine paused, and the way she stared at Yura made me think of a Nazi soldier in his rectangular coat with a German shepherd on a leash. How I hated The Guillotine at that moment! Even the mole on her cheek struck me as irrefutable proof of her sadism. And how desperately I loved Yura, Yurochka! I was so proud of him, and knew that other girls felt pride as well, and that knowledge made my pride glow even more because I wanted everyone to see how courageous he was, and for other boys to understand why they would never be like Yura.

“This is an intimate note,” he said. “I demand that you apologize to us.”

He was talking about that note, but it was as if he was defending much more. He was saying: We have the right to privacy, we are free to fall in love and be loved. Then someone from the back, likely Kolya, shouted, “Yeah, apologize!” and whisperings turned to loud cacophony. I heard Marina say, in her arrogant intonation, “Oh please, intimacy, what a bunch of crap,” and Polina said, “Marinka, shut up, you idiot!” I thought, any second now, The Guillotine will bang her knife-sharp fist on the table to shush us. And then—bam!—that fist. In the silence that followed, we held our breaths because The Guillotine shouted at Yura to sit down right this second, but he still stood, looking her in the eye with defiance, rescuing something sacred.

Yura was winning! Our Yura. Our fight.

Svetlana Beggs author photoSvetlana Beggs is a Seattle-based poet and writer hailing from St. Petersburg, Russia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in CALYX Journal, Natural Bridge, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review web features, Fogged Clarity, and elsewhere. Her fiction appears in Cleaver Magazine and Bartleby Snopes. Her short story “Alina” appears in Issue No. 10.

 

 

 

from THE BEAUTY OF ADMISSION by Joe Nicholas

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Engraving of mermaid with green tail

from THE BEAUTY OF ADMISSION
by Joe Nicholas

It’s seven in the morning & the shower is asking me questions

Did mermaids ever mistake us for wood cows?

For breakfast I ate a banana & blueberry

yoghurt / I’m never sure if I should drop

the “h” / Why

does it hurt

so much?

◊

There was the loneliness that crept down the stairs

from the attic with all those damp

boxes

Sometimes I picture you in pain & isn’t that strange to admit? / There is something here

There is something always here & now all this shaking

Years from now I’ll thank you for the dead flowers

◊

 

All these stains left in my wake

Do slugs ever try

to clean up their messes?

It’s early & I don’t want to talk

to anyone

but I do / This is how we live now

I don’t know what else to call it

Joe Nicholas author photoJoe Nicholas (AKA Dirty 4 String Orchestra) is an amorphous blob. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in alien mouth, BOAAT, Found Poetry Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Nervous Breakdown, and other wonderful publications. Their chapbook Street Monk can be found at Bottlecap Press. They can be found at 8rainCh1ld.tk.

Notes on POEM FOR MY BROTHER by Eric E. Hyett

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Black and white cherry blossoms

NOTES ON POEM FOR MY BROTHER
by Eric E. Hyett

I have to be careful—
what I mean is
it’s the absence of him that matters,

though the light’s the same.
I wear green a lot these days
like I’m a tree in bloom.

I attract insects and leaves.
Even my socks are stitched with leaves.
If I were a tree,

I could renounce memory
and survive for centuries
on sunlight and water.

And I don’t know how to save
my brother, exactly.
It’s not for him, that poem. Not

for anyone really. So I guess it’s against—
poem against my brother—in that
he’d never read it—or is it beside—

like a cobalt dragonfly
is beside the stream—everything I am
is beside my brother.

Eric E Hyett author photoEric E. Hyett is a poet, linguist, and translator from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His poetry, as well as his co-translations of contemporary Japanese poet Kiriu Minashita, appear frequently in major literary journals. Recent publications include The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, Barrow Street, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Antioch Review. Eric is presently finishing two poetry manuscripts (“Flight Risk” and “#Sexting”), a memoir, and Minashita’s first book of poetry, Sonic Peace.

Image credit: Ulf Bodin on Flickr

EVERYONE MEANS SO WELL by Lisa Piazza

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Green pigeon

EVERYONE MEANS SO WELL
by Lisa Piazza

  1. By fourth period

………we can barely breathe. Each stir of the stifled air whispers glitter into sound. The struggle at the board is all mine: a virtue of verbs, the urgency of action. Who can tell the compound from the complex? Every phrase dependent on the next. Sophia whines from the second seat: keep it simple. One subject, one verb. It’s a plea. I pull a name from the book on their desks: Scout discovers. Jem grows. Keep going: Boo scares, Dill hides, until Robert’s screech from the seat in the back corner un-silences the cycle. Today he’s a cheetah, all energy and thrust. Some days he is nothing but quiet. Across the room, Zaid knows better than to laugh but he does it anyway, then Regina, who hates her teeth, dares to smile and Leann pulls out her phone and Parker puts on his sunglasses and Devin the Quarterback sticks his fist out for a bump: Knuck it up, Ms. P.

  1. I look at these kids

………thinking only of my own: ten and six, due at the courthouse in three hours. Everyone means so well. Everyone’s mean, oh well. The first time in the dim office of Family Court Services, that thin county social worker with the long straight hair and click-click boots leaned forward to ask me why I hadn’t made the call before? You’re a mandatory reporter. Were you afraid child protective services was going to come after you? Huh! Huh? What will my kids say today? Our father this, our father that. Our mother pulled us into the bathroom to hide. Heart beat heavy. She? Cried on the edge of the tub. He? Set up camp outside, blocked the door with a chair. Kicked his feet up—scoffed, coughed. Waited. Waited.

  1. What about

………Atticus? Alanna asks—snapping me straight back—all of us leaning in, listening for the launch of the lunch bell—or an answer. Andrea’s quick: Everyone knows he’s too good to be true. Wouldn’t you like a father like that? I wishful think them into clean houses, square windows of light so easy to look into. Put my hand on my hip—take the teacher’s stride—glide from the board to the window as their eyes roll toward

  1. the dirty pigeon

………strutting into the dark hallway outside my basement classroom from the cafeteria doorway upstairs. Too late to ignore: Pigeon! Wait. This bird can be pretty in the sunlight, Matthew says. People laugh but he is used to that. His, what is it? His. Iridescence? Just hidden by shadows. He believes anything can shine. I agree, if only to salvage this lesson, which drags and pulls, pushes us back to the sinkhole at the center of the room, the drain of our minds going around and around until the bell rings.

  1. If we wanted

………to come of age, we would. Instead we wave the day away with the pigeon, watching it coo its way to the next thing (and the next), unbothered by our burdens or breath.

Lisa Piazza author photoLisa Piazza teaches writing to young people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work appears in Brain, Child, Cicada, YARN, Switchback, Prime Number and Literary Mama among others. Her flash piece “Look Here” appears in Issue No. 4 of Cleaver. She is currently at work on a young adult graphic novel-in-verse. Read more at her website.

YESTERDAY and TODAY by Addison Oliver

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Black and white woman underwater

TWO DAYS
by Addison Oliver

Yesterday

Yesterday I was at a party. I thought about dying. My sister-in-law was talking to me, kindly. There were the meek, metallic notes of music somewhere. Delicate food laid out on a table. I wasn’t looking at my sister-in-law. I was looking upwards to heaven, downwards to hell. But I’m an atheist, so it didn’t matter.

Please help me, God. Some people might think this, but I did not. I thought about the act of dying, how it would unravel me, leave me barren and cold. I was afraid to die, but there it was, beckoning.

The party was a mix of young and old. I was somewhere in the middle. There was the ocean just beyond the grass. Its breeze washed in and doubled back. It pearled like a desert. The sun was sharp and exposed. My children swung.

Death is the outlaw of life. Death would finish me off. I was in a hospital once, where people saw things that weren’t there and talked about fleeing out of windows. I talked in a quiet, sane voice wherever I went. The nurses weren’t timid. They seemed to flay me with their harsh instructions, barreling down the fluorescent corridors. I wanted to leave after a day. I begged persuasively. A doctor prescribed Paxil.

The party was over. I said goodbye in a voice that sounded like glass. Did people notice? They revealed nothing. I had cut my arms with knives, and the scars were like stains. I hid them.

My therapist once said, firmly, “You want me to worry to show that I care. I do care. But I can’t be worrying. Worrying will keep me up at night.”

Another thing he said, firmly: “I can’t help a dead person.”

We went home. Home was a house we stayed in one week every summer. It was my husband’s family’s house. One wall displayed, in penciled ticks, the lengthening heights of every child, going back to my husband’s now deceased father, from toddler to young adult.

The evidence of life outlasts death. What of the evidence of my life? Did death at my own hand mute it, render it worthless?

There was a plant outside that I liked. A Mandevilla, with its open-hearted pink blossoms, tangling its shoots around the post of the porch. But life sang less and less sweetly, and the plant had forsaken its purpose.

I slept. I slept well. I slept without dreaming. I woke, and the new day shrieked its hastening hell at me.

◊

Today

Today I put a bottle’s worth of antidepressants in my mouth, thinking I might swallow them. I let them sit there for several seconds, cold on my tongue, and then I spit them into my palm. I did it again—put them in, let them sit, spit them out—and then a third time. They stuck together from saliva. I was afraid; I was gearing myself up; even this I couldn’t accomplish. I imagined swallowing them, quite suddenly—do it!—the little slide over my tongue and the momentary bulge in my throat. But each time I imagined swallowing them, I became more afraid and dismally hoped I would fail.

I was alone in a room I didn’t like. A small, crowded room in which the bed filled the interior. I sat on the edge of that bed. There was a mirror in front of me, and I saw my reflection: fragile, pitiful, my hair in tangles but my eyes made up in speckled gold-green. My reflection was tarnished by a dark, blotted mirror, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t there to look at myself.

My family—a husband, two girls, a dog—was out on the mudflats. They were playing in the summer’s mud. But I couldn’t hear them, and it didn’t matter. They weren’t on—or in—my mind at all. Where were they? My access to them had crumbled. To live; to die; these contradictions entered my mind, and exited, and re-entered, twisting like knots. I let the pills sit on my tongue, for hours it seemed, but how to tell? I was so still, hardly breathing.

Then, it broke. I felt lethal, then very small, and then gigantic, in quick succession; I felt disobedient and dutiful all at once. I wanted to be brokenhearted, and I wanted to be saved. Was there no truthful end? I was disembodied from my death, except for the determined thought that I would have gotten what I deserved.

I thought of my family, then. Everything hinged on that thought. To live; to die—what poison on either side. And yet. And yet. I still couldn’t hear them, but I could imagine them. Resolute in play. Sweet, mischievous laughter, lovely in its humanity, ricocheting in the heartless heat. What would they think of me? What would they think?

I put the pills back in their bottle. I put the bottle back in its drawer.

Addison Oliver author photoAddison Oliver is the pseudonym of a writer who lives with her family in Massachusetts.

THE AFFAIR by Lyn Lifshin

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Cobblestone street with woman's heels and man's loafers

THE AFFAIR
by Lyn Lifshin

The Margaritas were blue with paper roses.
Later I thought how they were the only salt of those nights.
His email letters like skin,
very taut. What he didn’t say drugged me.
Language was wild, intense.
I could feel him, his screen name a tongue.
Verbs taut, what he didn’t say a drug.
It was a dangerous tango.
I wanted his body glued to mine.
Distance kept the electricity vivid.
It was a dangerous tango.
How could I know his mother leaped into Niagara Falls.
I fell for his words, what he left out.
How could I know he was ice.
How could I know his mother leaped into the falls.
Even in the heat, he was icy.
His name was Snow. Our last night
we drove thru fog until 3.
He told me things he said he’d never told anyone.
My thigh burned where it touched him.
On our last night we drove thru Austin
mist talking. I was burning.
He photographed me, exhausted, at 3 AM. Everything he
told me was a scar. My hair curled in a way
I hated. After that night I wasn’t sure
I would be pretty again.
Everything he told me was a
scar. Under the ice the anger in him was lava.
I wanted him, always longing for men
with something missing.
The Margaritas were the only salt I’d taste.
The anger in him was lava under the ice.
I wanted more, my longing a scar.
When he didn’t write, I printed his old e mail.
When I no longer looked for it
his email was there, like a mugger.
The Margaritas were strong with black paper roses.

Lyn Lifshin author photoLyn Lifshin has published over 130 books and chapbooks including three from Black Sparrow Press: Cold Comfort, Before It’s Light, and Another Woman Who Looks Like Me.  NYQ Books published A Girl Goes into The Woods. Also just out: For the Roses, poems after Joni Mitchell, and Hitchcock Hotel from Danse Macabre, Secretariat: The Red Freak, The Miracle, Femme Eterna and Moving Through Stained Glass: the Maple Poems. Forthcoming: Degas Little Dancer. Her poem “But Instead Has Gone Into the Wood” appears in Issue No. 10 of Cleaver.

 

Image credit: steven murashige on Flickr

ODE TO THE QUIET ROOM by Niyathi Chakrapani

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Black and white woman in bookstore

ODE TO THE QUIET ROOM
by Niyathi Chakrapani

…………There is a room
inside a paradox—the
…………silence, the calm of
…………grieving water, of lamenting purples in the sunset,
…………the flecks they see, admire,
…………but don’t love enough
……………………to remember.
…………And yet the silence is there, waiting,
…………surviving,
…………dancing alone with
……………………a [temporary] smile.

But—the paradox.
…………The marooned silence in which I fill my bones
with water, sustaining—yet barely—
…………for there is an element forgotten in
…………that moment; the silence, like water,
…………runs alone,…………unfriended, falling into seas
with vigor……………………………………………………that shakes the nerves as
……………………it breaks apart into molecules,…………writhing,…………trying
to come together,………… and yet, they are

alone.
……………………In isolation there is peace, and yet only more
……………………isolation.

The paradox soothes.
The quiet room, ephemeral disengagement from
the chaos of broken rivers—of
……………………loneliness inside candles—of
…………unloved bones.
When the door closes, I walk out, alone,
……………………and the river fractures,…………and the droplets break,
………………………………and the seas remember,
…………and we all scream

……………………together.

Niyathi Chakrapani author photoNiyathi Chakrapani is a poet, neuroscientist, and computer scientist, in no particular order. Find her book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Stars, on Amazon, and her work in Veritas and Filament Magazine. Niyathi is a two-time winner of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards National Silver Medal in Poetry and a poetry editor for Textploit Magazine. She is also a University of Pennsylvania freshman, mental health advocate, co-founder of Bridge: Freshman Mental Wellness, and a slightly rabid animal at the sight of chocolate.
Image credit: Thomas Leuthard on Flickr

STUDY by Andrew Taw

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Man staring at colorful milky way

STUDY
by Andrew Taw

Almost by accident, they found that the average frequency of a particular synapse firing in all dolphins directly correlated with the average frequency of all starlight. In countless dolphins, they implanted electrodes that gradually accelerated and slowed the frequency at regular intervals.

Within roughly 17 minutes, all things began to shift periodically up and down the visible color spectrum. Sometimes the trees took on the sky. Sometimes women thought themselves beautiful. The blind were still blind. The elders and the synesthetic became nocturnal. Under the effervescent moon and rain, tragedy seemed unfitting, which leadened the weight of loss.

After nine years, all of Alpha Centauri shifted from color to color, each of its three stars, a different moment from each other and our own. Then Barnard’s. Then Wolf 359. Then Sirius. When transience was all the young knew. By then, the dolphins had long since beached themselves, throwing themselves at the feet of their tormentors and found, to the scientists’ delight, they could not die.

Andrew Taw author photoAndrew Taw was born and raised in Northern California. He attended UC Davis for his undergraduate degree and Saint Mary’s College for his MFA. He currently manages the academic component of an educational nonprofit for high school students.

 

Image credit: Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

LESSONS by Michelle Ross

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Young rosie the riveter

LESSONS
by Michelle Ross

In the shed, the girl’s mother presents a hammer for the girl to examine. “A hammer is a lever, a simple machine. All simple machines reduce the push or pull force needed to move a load by increasing the distance over which that force must be applied,” she says.

The girl slides a finger over the cold metal knob and along the thick claws. She recalls the purple hammer birds in Alice in Wonderland—how their heads seemed backwards. The claw end of a hammer more closely resembles a beak, after all, but in the movie, the knobs are the birds’ beaks, and the claws like feathered hair moussed back. Of course, in the movie, the birds wedge nails into wood rather than pry them out as her mother does now.

“See how I lift the handle all the way up like this to remove the nail? I’m willing to work for a longer period of time so that I may apply less effort over the short term. In the end, conservation of energy always prevails: input equals output. But most people don’t appreciate how wildly different that input can be made to look and feel.”

As is the case with most of her mother’s lessons, the girl understands that this one is at least partly about the girl’s father. Since he left them, he has remarried; fathered two boys, brothers the girl has never met; and published a book of cookie recipes, three of which the girl’s mother claims he stole from her.

When they bake, her mother says that the girl shouldn’t believe the nonsense in cookbooks about how it’s important to measure ingredients carefully. “I eyeball everything,” her mother says. “It makes you wonder about people if they think baking is difficult.”

The girl pictures her father’s new life as a tower her mother will dismantle, one nail at a time.

Now the girl’s mother lifts the wood from which she removed the nail. “Know how this can be used as a simple machine?”

The girl shakes her head.

Her mother sets the wood onto the workbench and props up one end with a plastic tub of irrigation supplies. She places a box of nails at the other end.

“Imagine this box is really heavy. Push it up this inclined plane, and I can lift it without lifting it. The gentler the incline, the easier the load is to move, only I have to push the load longer. Not a bad trade-off, no? But most people are lazy. They’d risk throwing out their backs to be done faster.”

The girl’s grandmother said her mother should take him to court and make him pay. But her mother said, “Let him sleep like the hare. Let him think he’s won.”

That made her mother the tortoise, who moves slowly because it carries armor on its back. What her mother plans to do when she catches up with the hare, the girl doesn’t know, but she knows this: there will be a lesson.

Michelle Ross author photoMichelle Ross’s writing has won prizes from Gulf Coast, Main Street Rag, and Sixfold and has been twice nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Arroyo Literary Review, The Common, cream city review, Necessary Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, Synaesthesia Magazine, Word Riot, and other journals. She is Fiction Editor of Atticus Review.

 

 

Image credit: Mary Jo Boughton on Flickr

HAMLET THERAPY by Maud Burnett McInerney

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black and white hamlet looking at skull

HAMLET THERAPY
by Maud Burnett McInerney

The last time I had seen a live production of Hamlet, I was a teenager, and I fell in love with the Melancholy Dane. He was beautiful and blonde and had one of those resonant voices, trained by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I learned all of Ophelia’s lines—this seems disturbing to me now, but then I played her over and over again in the privacy of my bedroom.

Nearly forty years later, I saw Hamlet again on the very same stage at the Canada’s Stratford Festival. This time, I saw a different play entirely. I was no longer in love with Hamlet, I was Hamlet. Watching the play from the dark shadow of my own depression, I recognized myself on stage. I could taste the flavor of Hamlet’s every mood because his moods were mine.

Just to be clear, the precipitating cause of my depression was not that my uncle killed my father and married my mother. It was more mundane and yet horribly painful: my husband of over 20 years left me for a much younger woman, with whom, I eventually learned, he had been involved for some time. Not tragic, just sad and disappointing and commonplace, and yet, because betrayal is betrayal, I felt what Hamlet felt.

The second Stratford production was both stylized and extremely naturalistic, especially when it came to how the actors spoke. No one declaimed, no one used British-y accents, the words were clearly and rapidly delivered in ordinary Canadian tones. The characters spoke as you and I do but using Shakespeare’s words, and thus those words gained an intimacy they all too often lack in stagier performances. And the lines of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, so familiar and yet so new in this plain delivery, went through me like an electric current:

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canons ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.

Oh, I thought. That’s how I feel every single day. I wish I simply weren’t here, weren’t suffering what I suffer. People often call Hamlet suicidal, but he’s not; he’s perfectly clear that killing himself is not an option, and so, for different reasons, am I. To live in a world which has lost all its colors, flavors, and scents is constant pain, and he simply wishes to be out of it. There’s some critical debate around the word “solid;” some people think it’s a joke of Shakespeare’s at the expense of a presumably portly leading man, Richard Burbage. Some think it should be “sullied.” But “solid flesh” makes sense to me as I watch my own solid flesh diminish, ten pounds in six weeks because I have no appetite.

The speech ends when Hamlet hears his friend Horatio arriving: “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” And when Horatio, Marcellus and Barnardo enter to tell Hamlet about their encounter with the ghost, Hamlet is a different person. He’s energetic, enthusiastic, and affectionate. Throughout the play, the same transformation occurs. In the soliloquies, Hamlet is full of pain, crippled by it, but when others appear (the players, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) he becomes almost manic:

You are welcome masters, welcome all! I am glad to see thee well. Welcome, good friends.—Oh, old friend! Why thy face is valanced since I saw thee last. Com’st thou to beard me in Denmark?—What, my young lady and mistress! By’re lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine!

He is courteous, jovial, friendly—and the players, who will become part of his plot to “catch the conscience of the king” have no idea what lies behind all of this bonhomie.

This too I recognize. I sit in my office, writing this, and I weep. And then I dry my tears and go downstairs and teach an absolutely kickass class on Antony and Cleopatra. I go to administrative meetings, and I am informed and competent and forceful and to the point. People ask how I am, and I say I’m fine. I perform fineness. I laugh I talk about ideas and books, about why I find King Lear disappointing, about politics, and I’m funny and I’m smart and no one can see the blank despair inside. Just like Hamlet, for whom the step from performing normalcy to performing madness is a small one, since both conditions are equally artificial. Hamlet is not insane. His mind works perfectly well, even if it works to his own perdition, as depressed minds do.

“The conscience of the king…” What Hamlet wants is to know that his uncle Claudius is truly guilty. Hamlet suspects but he doesn’t know. In fact, he suspects a great many things. How long have his mother and his uncle actually been sleeping together? The marriage of his mother to his uncle comes only two months after his father’s death. My husband’s new relationship started a few weeks after our separation. And before? Like so many depressives, Hamlet is obsessive. He can’t stop thinking about what might be happening between his uncle and his mother, in their bed, when it started, what conversations, what plans they might have made even while his father was living. He can’t look at poor, innocent Ophelia, because she reminds him of his mother. His mind runs always in the same patterns, and like Othello in a different play, he needs “ocular proof” which he gets when he observes Claudius’ response to the play within the play. He needs Claudius to recognize his own guilt and to recognize Hamlet’s recognition of it.

This too, I get. What did they say? When did they say it? What kinds of violations of a bond I thought secure were enacted? Around and around it goes, and Hamlet and I can think of nothing else. Everything turns back to this one thing. “The conscience of the king…” How I wish I could catch it, but to what end? What would it tell me to know?

And then the dreams, from the most famous speech of all: “To sleep, perchance to dream… Aye, there’s the rub! For in that sleep of death, what dreams might come?” Hamlet dreams of his father, of his uncle—in the recent production I saw, Claudius and the ghost were played by the same actor, a move so brilliant that I can’t believe it isn’t done more often. He dreams of his mother, and he dreams of Ophelia, but they all become interchangeable in the nightmare. I have dreams where my ex-husband presents me with a baby that is not mine, but is his, and demands that I take care of it; I dream that I’m with him on a ship, and he thinks he knows where we’re going, but the waves are crashing over us; and worst of all, I have dreams where we are together as we used to be, happy, laughing, walking together hand in hand, making love. These are the dreams from which I wake in tears.

Everyone knows how Hamlet ends, with a stage full of corpses: Claudius, Gertrude, poor innocent Laertes and Ophelia, and Hamlet himself. “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” says Horatio, the friend who has always loved him. But these days, I’m trying to imagine an alternate ending. In Act IV, the king sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who carry letters that will ensure his murder upon arrival. They are attacked by pirates on the way. Hamlet is taken prisoner but ransoms himself, and the pirates bring him back to Denmark, filled with thoughts of revenge, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry on to England and their own eventual deaths. I’m imagining a scenario in which Hamlet stays with the pirates, becomes their captain, and sails with them to the fabulous Indies (West or East, geography doesn’t matter here), living a life of bloody but satisfying adventure.

Or perhaps they maroon him on an island like that of Prospero, where “the air is full of noises, sounds and sweet music,” where he can reflect, like the philosopher he is, and walk on the silver sand and sleep in a bed of soft leaves and be quite alone and heal, and cease from dreaming.

Maud Burnett McInerney author photoBorn in Chicago, Maud Burnett McInerney grew up in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, where she had the opportunity to see nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays by the time she was twenty (exceptions: Timon of Athens, Henry VIII ). She teaches Medieval Literature at Haverford College but spends as much time as she can in in her house near Dijon, in France.

Image credit: Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, Wikipedia

 

NEWS DELIVERY by Smriti Verma

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White teacup and dish with tea

NEWS DELIVERY
by Smriti Verma

Once, my brother set himself on fire, on a cold December morning.
We were sitting on the front porch with a glass of sherry, a skull,
arms, winds. Said: ‘my hands, the fingernails, the hair.’
And then, a pause. That was also the winter my mother, sixty now,
came home from Delhi, limping straighter than usual. I gave her
the news, you gave her a cup of tea. And in the corner, my brother’s hands-
burnt, yet working. Moving in space. His hair, faulty ends,
sticking out like remnant ashes we forgot to throw away.
My eyes slowly dissolving, and your hand—grounded to bone.
And my mouth, opening and closing, sewed with a fabric of glass.
My body lost to me like the last vanishing oranges of sunset.

Smriti Verma author photoSmriti Verma’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Word Riot, Open Road Review, DoveTales Literary Journal, Canvas, Textploit, and Yellow Chair Review. Further work is forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, Inklette, and Eunoia Review. She is the recipient of the Save The Earth Poetry Prize 2015 and enjoys working as a poetry reader for Inklette and editorial intern for The Blueshift Journal.