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HOW TO BE ANOTHER by Susan Lewis reviewed by Carlo Matos

HOW TO BE ANOTHER
by Susan Lewis
Červená Barva Press, 81 pages

reviewed by Carlo Matos

In How to be Another, Susan Lewis explores the full range of the prose poem form. These poems read like short speculative essays in the tradition of Montaigne, which is to say they have a metaphysical or epistemological bent to them. “Most knowing goes unlicensed,” says the speaker archly in “Introduction to Appreciation.” We are not dealing in this book with the esoteric details of autobiography or memoir but with the broader experiences of humanity as a species. How to be Another isn’t concerned with the kind of surface empathy or watered-down existential day-seizing of self-help books (as the title might suggest) but is instead a work of anthropology—though, clearly, these perspectives must intersect to some extent. For example, the speaker of “Introduction to Narcissism (III)” says, the “point is, self-awareness confers little evolutionary advantage. We are not wired for objectivity.” However, later in the same poem, the speaker acknowledges that the “pain” caused by self-awareness “is relentless, staying with you longer than any friend or flattering memory.” The shift to the second-person pronoun is telling for although the “you” is largely rhetorical in nature, it is still much more personal than the third-person perspective of the rest of the poem. Evolution itself is not the problem; it’s the fact that our species has evolved, or so the poem seems to suggest, to a point of diminishing returns.

TOUCHÉ by Rod Smith reviewed by Brandon Lafving

TOUCHÉ
by Rod Smith
Wave Books, 112 pages

reviewed by Brandon Lafving

Poetry these days is unglamorous, but at least it’s fun. At most, it’s fun. Rod Smith’s Touché plays, but you would have to call it mischievous because it hits you with über grit, and not one punch is held back.

“Everything I have written is trash. I have not / even the strength to love. Let it go.” The blunt emotion of these lines is the impulse of “Buoyancy”—the cathartic moment of a tormented artist who is filled with self-hatred and guilt over his inability to love a woman more than his work, and his work at all.

The pathos is so real to me—the hapless raising-onto-pedestal of a woman—the inevitable transition to thoughts of writing: “I have to write past this obsession / with you, Nora, with an invalid / admiration in the learning. You’ve / got the idea. I’m a calf. & the victory / of the light. // Does it go on? The poem I mean.” I am pretty sure I felt this way last week. Touché, indeed.

DOCTORS by Dash Shaw reviewed by Brian Burmeister

DOCTORS
by Dash Shaw
Fantagraphics Books, 96 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

What is it that awaits us after death? In his graphic novel, Doctors, artist/writer Dash Shaw creates a world in which each afterlife is unique, generated from one’s own memories with assistance from a newly-invented medical device, the Charon.

Throughout Doctors, Shaw showcases skillful storytelling. The world he creates is inventive and fascinating. From the beginning, he successfully pulls in the reader with the story’s sense of mystery. One quickly wonders what is real as the initial central character of Miss Bell struggles to make sense of a series of confusing events in her life.

As the story surrounding Miss Bell unfolds, we learn that doctors have created (through the Charon) a way to prolong life after death, allowing one’s consciousness to live on temporarily in a joyous modern-day Elysium. Within the afterlife, doctors are able to communicate with the deceased and, when successful, are able to compel the person to return to the land of the living, at least for a limited time.

A HISTORY OF MONEY by Alan Pauls reviewed by Rory McCluckie

A HISTORY OF MONEY
by Alan Pauls
translated by Ellie Robins
Melville House, 197 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

There has never been a time when the subject of money wasn't fertile ground for a work of literature; whatever view you take on its role in our lives, it's central to them. From the economic policies of governments to the spare change tossed into a busker's guitar case, it's difficult to imagine what life without it might look like. Not a bad subject, then, for a work that is set to catapult its author onto the international stage. Alan Pauls is an Argentinian novelist, essayist, and critic who has been writing fiction for years while holding various academic and editorial posts in Argentina and the United States. Indeed, he seems to be so active and prolific in his various roles that it's perhaps surprising that Pauls' 2007 novel, The Past, has, until now, been his only work to have received an English language translation. With A History of Money, he should have assured that such negligence comes to an end. This is a skillfully realized work, as accomplished in its execution as it is acute in its criticism.

YOU DON’T SAY by Nate Powell reviewed by Stephanie Trott

YOU DON’T SAY
by Nate Powell
Top Shelf Productions, 176 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Given ten years, an artist can undergo a series of personal evolutions that may come to mark them as a master. Among these seasoned individuals sits Nate Powell, a graphic novelist who has been writing and self-publishing since the age of fourteen. His most recent collection, You Don’t Say, presents seventeen short stories written over the course of a decade that celebrate the range of realizations that contribute to our inevitable maturation.

Targeting a young adult audience, these narratives are relatable to all who are in or beyond those infamous teenage years. From nights spent idling in barren parking lots to the realization that we will not forever willingly stay up past 3 A.M., Powell captures the a-ha! moments that come to define us as adults in the face of calendar rotations. Each installment features a brief text-based introduction that both describes the inspiration for the following piece and explains the comic in relation to the artist. Powell also includes suggestions as to how certain pieces should be read, asking the reader to consume several in one go or to allow features to work as singular entities. He shows the reader respect, and we in turn follow him down a psychological rabbit hole into a shaded world of self-doubt, superiority complexes, and good but misplaced intentions. Among these well-laid plans is the narrative “Cakewalk,” a non-fiction account in which a young white girl dresses in blackface as Aunt Jemima for Halloween. Forced by a teacher to remove the meticulously applied charcoal, we learn that the girl deeply wishes to embody the person she imagines the iconic matriarch to be: “I imagined that everybody liked Aunt Jemima. And that they stared at her face like I did when I ate pancakes in the morning.”

SUPERIOR PACKETS by Susie Timmons reviewed by Clare Paniccia

SUPERIOR PACKETS
by Susie Timmons
Wave Books, 181 pages

reviewed by Clare Paniccia

So often we find a characterization and romanticization of New York City within literature and film—the city forming a metaphor for struggle and loss and surrounding a scene with an obvious reminder that time (or taxis) waits for no one. If we close our eyes and imagine “New York,” we might see towering skyscrapers, new-age coffee shops serving only one type of organic bean, streets marred with the remnants of garbage and posters… This is the city that we know—the one that pulses continuously in our veins and invites a feeling of hunger or thirst, in that we cannot be satiated unless we are wholly involved in the movement, in “it.”

I find it important to imagine my own relationship to the city before interpreting Susie Timmons’ three-volume collection of poetry, Superior Packets, which takes on its own characterization of a late twentieth-century New York. Any place, the city or otherwise, can mold to the individual experience—within spaces and locales we encounter our own subjective realities that form the basis for our relationship to that particular environment. Out of these subjective events, these memories, we create our own understanding, our own identities that take on pieces of these locales as fragments of our individuality.

THE ARGONAUTS by Maggie Nelson reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

THE ARGONAUTS
by Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press, 160 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Sometimes an idea reverberates and echoes for a long time, like a song. This was my experience reading Maggie Nelson’s revelatory new memoir, The Argonauts, which starts with an idea Nelson found reading Wittgenstein: “the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed…”, and “its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.” Nelson wrote the book while she was with her partner, the non-binary trans artist Harry Dodge, and pregnant with their first child. At one level,The Argonauts recounts her experiences with Dodge, whose gender identity consciously resists the traps of language, and with parenthood. In attempting a reconciliation of the two perspectives, Nelson finds a freedom through language.

More than simply telling a ‘story’, Nelson considers here the act of trying to bring experience into language and ideas, particularly those which seem to oppose this very act. She incorporates an array of ideas from theorists ranging from Judith Butler to Wittgenstein in order to consider the inexpressibles of gender, sexuality, joy, and the seeming contradiction of queer parenthood and marriage—an experience increasingly brought into the mainstream of social structures and away from radicalism.

In the brief interval between my first reading of The Argonauts and the writing of this review, the Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. This is, in many ways, an important and very positive development for queer rights, yet it is also far from an ending. In the book, Nelson pointedly notes, “if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us.”

TOMBO by W.S. Di Piero reviewed by Johnny Payne

TOMBO
by W.S. Di Piero
McSweeney’s, 63 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

Giacomo Leopardi speaks of two essential kinds of imagination: strong and promiscuous. The first is “weighty, impassioned, melancholic, with deep emotion and passion, all fraught with life hugely suffered.” The second is “playful, light, fleet, inconstant in love, high spirited.”

The W.S. Di Piero of The Dog Star, the one I first encountered as a reader, is of the strong variety, as in his depiction of a somber Whitman attending injured soldiers and offering introspection on a Civil War battlefield in “Walt, the Wounded.”

A small fire still burns in the nursery.
Rice and molasses simmer on the stove.
Children will have to learn to ask for less,

less from the elephant dawn that chilled
across the heights where Lee held his ground.

Or there is the dark homage “To My Old City”: “diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked / on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers / from the black newsstand.” In it, memory figures as corrosive.

Surely all poets offer changes in mood, even within a single book, but underlying shifts in temperament happen over time, if at all. And with the appearance of Tombo, I may observe, without being accused of vicious gossip, that Di Piero The Strong has turned promiscuous.

BETWEEN GRAMMARS by Danielle Vogel reviewed by Amanda Hickok

BETWEEN GRAMMARS
by Danielle Vogel
Noemi Press, 78 pages

reviewed by Amanda Hickok

It’s so often that a book of poetry can be thought of as a static object, a collection of disembodied words that are supposed to transcend the body and voice of their author on the page. And it’s so often that poets are bodiless, as poetry—no matter how much it is about bodies—must be divorced from its corporeal source and recipient; that a poet writes for an anonymous reader who in turn reads nobody behind their words. However, and perhaps ironically, poetry’s meaning comes at least in part from its resonance within these bodies, in its ability to stir in them a visceral reaction. Danielle Vogel knows this, addresses this with a forceful intimacy between poet, reader, and page that is both beautiful and challenging in a breaking-the-fourth-wall kind of way, in the vulnerability it necessitates that we are so often sheltered from.

Between Grammars, a book-length poem, begins with an equation of text and body—epigraphs that include “we melt into each other with phrases… We make an unsubstantial territory,” from Woolf, and “Language is a skin,” from Barthes, and then a prologue in five volumes: body, letter, page, book, body. It’s significant that we start with VOLUME: BODY and circle back to it, volume itself as the attempt to unfold the hidden dimensions of these relationships, and the cyclical trajectory as the making and renewal of meaning in the body. The next section begins WATERSHED, and I can almost hear the tearing of the thin membrane between body and text as seamless contiguity floods the boundaries.

COUP DE FOUDRE by Ken Kalfus reviewed by Carolyn Daffron

COUP DE FOUDRE
A Novella and Stories
by Ken Kalfus
Bloomsbury Press, 277 pages

reviewed by Carolyn Daffron

Ken Kalfus is an audacious stylist, whose stories and novels often invoke the likes of Borges, Calvino, Golgol, and Saramago. His choice of subject matter can be equally fearless: cosmology, 9-11, and the grand sweep of Russian history, to name only a few. Coup de Foudre, the novella which forms the centerpiece of his most recent collection of short fiction, is a coruscating example of this gutsiness and high literary ambition.

Not that I enjoyed reading it, at least not the first time. Coup de Foudre tells the story of David Léon Landau, a character not-at-all-loosely based on French financier and former presidential hopeful Dominque Strauss-Kahn (known in France and now everywhere as “DSK”) who was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in his New York hotel in 2011. Although criminal charges were dropped, the case led to a civil settlement, various other scandalous accusations and revelations, and the ruin of DSK’s career.

The novella is a first person account of the hotel assault and the events immediately surrounding it, written in the form of a letter to Mariama, the housekeeper-victim—a letter which Landau can never send to her or anyone without violating a civil gag order and subjecting himself to criminal prosecution. Landau’s story, which parallels DSK’s in almost every known particular, is a repellent one, and its narrator is about as monstrous and unappetizing—to say nothing of unreliable—as they come. Even while purportedly seeking “moral benefit” from “fully and exactingly” acknowledging his errors, the chief of which is that he forcefully fellated Mariama, he cannot help reminding her that his name “signified financial brilliance in the service of the public” and that a water treatment plant he financed in her home country may once have given her clean liquid to “sip thirstily and with pleasure…You may even have reflected at the time on the liquid’s animating power and plenitude…Some may have spilled from the sides of your mouth.” It is hard not to shudder at this.

THE TRAVELS OF DANIEL ASCHER by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat reviewed by Melissa M. Firman

THE TRAVELS OF DANIEL ASCHER
by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat
translated by Adriana Hunter
Other Press, 189 pages

reviewed by Melissa M. Firman

How well do we really know the people we love? What happens when the family stories and personal histories we’ve grown up believing turn out to be fiction—or, at best, a version of the truth?

These are the questions explored in The Travels of Daniel Ascher, the debut novel of Déborah Lévy-Bertherat. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, this is a quick, fast-paced read where much happens in this story-within-a-story novel.

Hélène, a 20 year old archaeologist living in Paris, is a typical university student; she’s exploring her new city, falling in love with Guillaume, and occasionally babysitting a young neighbor boy. Among the few people she knows in Paris is her great-uncle, Daniel Roche, a famous author. His books, written under the pseudonym H.R. Sanders, are bestselling literary travel adventures with dashes of fantasy and mystery. (Think Harry Potter.)

THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

THE BOOK OF LANEY
by Myfanwy Collins
Lacewing Books, 200 pages

reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

When terrible acts of violence occur—as they do all too often in America—our thoughts naturally turn to the victims and their families. But what about the families of those who commit violent crimes? What if someone you grew up with was a school shooter, a terrorist, a mass murderer?

That’s the reality fifteen-year-old Laney is living. Her brother West and his friend Mark, two high school outcasts, boarded a school bus armed with machetes, knives, guns, and homemade bombs. Six people died; twelve were wounded. Mark blew himself up, but West made his way home to kill his mother, and he would have killed Laney, too, if police hadn’t stopped him. Left with the wreckage her brother left behind, Laney feels completely alone, unwanted, even hated. Her father died when she was young, and her mother’s boyfriend is only interested in leaving the state as soon as possible. Strangers phone the house with death threats. This is her only identity now: the killer’s sister.

THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS by Ryo Yamaguchi reviewed by Johnny Payne

THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS
Ryo Yamaguchi
Noemi Press, 97 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

This chaste book could be titled The Story of O. Ryo Yamaguchi rhapsodizes, if more quietly, in the mood of Keats when he exclaims “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”:

O machine, O accord, I no longer ask the things I need
not ask . . .

the slow atmosphere of story has refused too long

to seat my rhythms, and I
have refused to elaborate myself through its lines.

His drama of sensate consciousness is based on the refusal (ergo the title) to follow the suit of narrative poetry, in favor of the mind’s free play. Yet one may legitimately ask, as we sometimes do of historical novels, whether the writer courts anachronism or rather renews the proposition. In the case of Yamaguchi, the answer is complex.

Many times I found myself wondering whether this one-vowel incantatory tendency was a tic or sprang organically from what I am tempted to call “new lyric.” “O youth, o conflagration, O end of summer parking lots”; “O office of elaborate letters, O remark”; “O here is the work”; “O John the Baptist”; “O hybridized floral shift.” All this is contained in a single poem, and there are many like it. Bemused, I could say at least that the tone is not ironic, as in Laurie Anderson’s suburbia-mocking “O Superman/O Mom and Dad.”

ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND by Box Brown reviewed by Brian Burmeister

ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND
by Box Brown
First Second Books, 240 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

For a generation of professional wrestling fans, Andre Roussimoff was a giant, both as a man (he stood seven-feet, four-inches tall and weighed 500 pounds) and as an icon (he was one of the most successful and beloved wrestlers of all time).

In telling Andre’s story, author/illustrator Box Brown did his homework. A life-long fan of professional wrestling, Brown draws upon interviews with those who personally knew Andre as well archival footage in an effort to show a complete and accurate portrayal of Andre’s life in and out of the ring. Throughout Andre the Giant’s pages we see Andre as a young boy growing up in the French countryside, Andre as an up-and-comer in the professional wrestling circuit, and finally Andre the globe-trekking celebrity. Along the way, Brown gives life to dozens of anecdotes about the wrestler, moments ranging from playful to painful but always compelling and curious.

For those less familiar with professional wrestling, Brown takes pains to make the material accessible. Throughout the course of the narrative, he includes a preface in which he imparts to the reader a useful description of wrestling as business, explains all necessary terminology in text and within a glossary in the back of the book, and walks the reader through the context and culture of professional wrestling fandom during the 1970s and 80s.

Brown’s visual style is simple and fun, much like professional wrestling itself. While a more superhero-y sort of approach might have been equally fitting, Brown draws each moment in a very comic way, giving a light-hearted feel to the entirety of the work. Andre’s size lends itself well to this cartoonish format, allowing Brown to exaggerate Andre’s hugeness even further for effect, a move which lets Brown take the Giant’s legacy and spin it into the stuff of legend.

BLACK RIVER by Josh Simmons reviewed by Stephanie Trott

BLACK RIVER
by Josh Simmons
Fantagraphics Books, 110 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Despite society’s wonderment over advances of the human race, we are nonetheless fascinated by hypotheses of how the world may one day cease to exist. And while prophecies of rapture have yet to prove veritable, there exist countless fictional renderings of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The medium of graphic narrative has long played host to such tales, from the teenage plague that dominates Charles Burns’s iconic Black Hole to the psychedelic stylings of anarchist rebel Tank Girl. In this spirit comes Josh Simmons’s Black River, which follows a gang of five women and one man as they traverse a dormant planet void of laws and warmth.

Led by the experienced Seka over the course of more than a decade, the group searches in hopes of locating the fabled city of Gattenberg—“walled in and completely self-sufficient, protected by sharp-shooters all around the city.” They are survivalists to the Nth degree, employing stockpiled supplies unused by those now deceased; their camaraderie is strong (as they quite literally sleep together in an attempt to stay warm through the night) and extends both to preserving life and taking it when necessary. The reader does not receive much exposition regarding life before the present day, save for a wavering account of how every possible proposition of world’s end contributed to humanity’s current state of being.

THE ART OF ASKING by Amanda Palmer reviewed by Justin Goodman

THE ART OF ASKING
by Amanda Palmer
Grand Central Publishing, 333 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

"Art is the Artist"
I first heard of Amanda Palmer while driving a flashy, cherry red Mustang convertible blasting “Girl Anachronism” from a speaker system clearly not made to handle any song at full volume, let alone one already deafening at standard volume for an ipod-earbud combo. It didn’t help that it was my car, and that my first girlfriend and I were the ones in it. By 2009 a year had passed since Palmer’s band, the Dresden Dolls, broke up, and three years before she would give the TED talk that would inspire the memoir The Art of Asking. My relationship and my car had both broken down by that point and as I, that bachelor now in a minivan, would likely have said about Palmer’s memoir-essay, there is one thing the three have in common: they deeply affected my life, and then repeated themselves enough that I wanted them to be done with.

Memoirs often annoy me, in part, because they take Whitman’s advice too literarily: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” And that’s not to ignore that such songs lend themselves to marketing nicely. That is the function, generally, of celebrity memoirs. But Amanda Palmer, musician-blogger turned memoirist, was already given this treatment, wrongly, when her more than successful and record-setting Kickstarter became journalist gossip about, as she summarizes, “what a terrible person I was, on top of being an untrained, unprofessional, shitty musician.” This book doesn’t feel like it intends to sell itself. It even comes across as if it has no idea who the audience is, as when she explains crowdsourcing, “for the uninitiated.” (What Palmer fan purchased this book “uninitiated?”) Like any good memoir, be it Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, or anything by David Sedaris, it uses its jointed memory to propel it towards insight. How the joints connect, though, is what makes a memoir work. So, while Sedaris uses a series of essays, and Woolf the titular moments of being, Palmer’s book seems nebulous in that it has no organizing function. The text switches between her budding romance with Neil Gaiman (now her husband), to her record label experiences, with essentially random stories intermixed, as new experiences accrue over time.

WHALE WATCHING by Lisa J. Sharon

WHALE WATCHING
by Lisa J. Sharon

Katherine’s father wanted to get out of the city. “We can hike and star gaze,” he said. “I want to show Katherine the whales.” So, early in the morning they packed the car and locked up their townhouse. Katherine climbed into the back seat, and her mother tucked her stuffed dog into the seatbelt with her. As they started down the driveway, her father stopped the car, “Where’s that photo album? The one with Phillip?”

“In the attic with your parents’ things. You’re not going back for it?”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

He returned with a large brown photo album. Katherine’s mother moved to the driver’s seat, “I’ll take the first shift,” and her father settled in the passenger seat with the album on his lap.

They headed north over roads that thinned from six lanes to four. “Goodbye, Massachusetts. Hello, New Hampshire,” they said together. Katherine’s parents talked about the cabin. Would there be cleaning supplies or should they stop in Portland and buy a mop and Lysol? Katherine’s mother sang to Simon and Garfunkel. Her father flipped through the pages of the photo album. He reminisced about Phillip their seed-spitting contests and the time they knocked down the bees’ nest in the wood shed. He turned to Katherine to tell her about the time, when Phillip was seven and Katherine’s father five, Phillip got the ladder from the shed and the two of them climbed the red maple tree along the path to Jackson Ridge so they could peer into the nest of the barred owl. “He had no fear,” Katherine’s father said, wiping his hand across his eyes. Between stories he’d fall silent. Katherine gazed into the passing woods of jack pines and aspen and saw Phillip riding between the trees like a cowboy on the back of a whale.

NOW IN ELSEWHERE, A Now for MENAM by Orkan Telhan

NOW IN ELSEWHERE
A Now for MENAM
by Orkan Telhan

The Middle East. North Africa. The Mediterranean. Asia Minor and the Levant. These refer to inexact geographies. It is hard to tell where each begins and ends. As names, they may take on different meanings when they refer to people, languages, belief systems, and politics, all of which constantly negotiate their identities with respect to one another. As places, they may bring together a series of disjointed lands unified as an imaginary cultural construct, yet whose presence lives everywhere, whose lands have produced many diasporas around the globe. Today, someone from Little Syria, New York, uses the same recipe for hummus that a grandmother uses in Syria. And it tastes different; taste belongs neither here nor there, and changes every moment.

It is often an oriental gaze that renders these uneasy, tenuous connections. This is a gaze that comes both from the desire to belong to a place and the fear of its possibility. Thus the Middle East, North Africa, or the Mediterranean always exist as mediated elsewheres where only others can belong. Or where we belong as others.

Making sense of all of this today is an art. Is opinion really in the eyes of the beholder? What is there to look at when our interpretation will always be skewed by what is selectively mediated for us? Where or whom do we belong if opinions are already others’?

“A Now for MENAM” is an artwork that responds to these questions. It reflects on our habits of looking and making meaning out of what is thrown at us by media. It proposes a different kind of interface—perhaps a less complacent window or mirror—that tries to present the other in its fluidity; with enough room for fact and fiction.

CREAM FLAVORED & CHERRY SCENTED by Chelsea M. Harris

CREAM FLAVORED & CHERRY SCENTED
by Chelsea M. Harris

She told you she was driving to the bridal store to shop for dresses with the girls she used to babysit before you were born since she knew she’d never see you all wrapped up in a marshmallow mess surrounded by floor-length mirrors, asking questions like How does my ass look? and Do you think he’ll love it? your cheeks glowing in rose-colored blooms, eyes done up in sugar-coated sparkle, pupils wide, sipping down those strawberry cosmos, fifteen dollars a whack because you’re at fancy place with silk curtains and shimmer walls dripping in white, dripping in the things you ask your daddy for because that’s a man’s job and why’s he even living if not to pay for you to marry one under a string of Jell-O lights, your twinkle toes strapped into nine-inch heels, a thread of crusted diamonds kissing your chest, and whose to say you even love this guy with the charcoal mustache, with the beady smile, telling you one night when your twisting underneath him that he’s done a whole lot of fucking, a whole lot of banging pounding knocking nailing

GIRL ON THE MOON by Andy Bailey

GIRL ON THE MOON
by Andy Bailey

College kid this time. Loud, heard him soon as they got out of the car, warbling like someone too comfortable with his own voice. Badly fucked up or bad at faking: had to be a college kid. Blue-collar guys handle their booze and don’t have to be loud to prove a point, and professional types bug out when they see our shithole. She even brought a black guy back once, the only one who introduced himself, cooked us eggs before he left.

Must’ve gone to the dives near the college, had her pick of beer-soaked frat boys blue-balled from staring at tight Mormon asses all day. Knew it was going to be one of those nights, fucking knew it, but I’d stopped taking Tylenol PM the month before, giving my liver a well-earned retirement, and had to spend each night wrestling my thoughts and gripping the mattress so I wouldn’t get up and do something stupid. Should’ve put more shit up in the room to distract me, lava lamp or aquarium or those squirmy little sea monkeys. Shit, probably should’ve moved rooms in the first place—hate and hurt seeped into the walls—moved rooms, moved houses, moved cities. But time gives a fuckall about your plans.

JUDGING DISTANCE by Hannah Allen

JUDGING DISTANCE
by Hannah Allen

A word is flung into the dark from the sidewalk behind me, but I don’t recognize the voice it belongs to. What did he say? Tighten my scarf around my neck, hold my umbrella a little lower, scan the approaching expanse of parking lot for other students leaving campus. Night classes let out an hour ago, parking spaces vacant.

“Slut!” The word, clear and hard, snaps against my ears. I sidestep a sheet of ice. Fingers involuntarily fumble in my coat pocket. Is he talking to me? I meant to sew up the hole in my jacket, the one that sucks change, lighter, and keys deep into the lining. Too late now. My fingers can’t make sense of the mess. Slow down to feel out my keys. Mom’s voice in my head: You should already have them out, dear.

“SLUT! HEY SLUT!” The voice, closer. Coming from the right but from how far back, I’m not sure. Never been good at depth perception. It’s near enough that I forget about finding my keys. Why did I leave work early? Only had ten minutes left. Head down, I march towards my old Buick at the far end of the empty lot. Rain, lashing below the umbrella, blinds me. Already a slack bun gathered at the nape of my neck, my hair works free. Sharp, wet edges slap at my face. Tears gather at the corner of my left eye. I think of my boyfriend. Wish Drew would’ve answered my fucking call. Pull my phone from my slacks and try again. Voicemail.

ALINA by Svetlana Beggs

ALINA
by Svetlana Beggs

When I was young and living in San Francisco’s Sunset District with a roommate, I had a job selling underwear at Neiman Marcus. If I were to speak of this job with more reverence I would say that I sold “intimate apparel.” But “underwear” is more honest and also closer to “undercover,” because that’s what I was, an incognito undergraduate philosophy major, covered up by a lot of expensive underwear. I had to be a good salesperson to an occasional businessman who came in to grope La Perla panties (at $130 apiece). These men would ask, in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, “Where is the nearest restroom?” And I would say, “Straight and then left, next to the children’s department.”

One late night I was working alone and had to close the register. I was putting bras back on their hangers. When I looked up, I saw a very attractive woman who dared to examine underwear a few minutes before the store had to close.

She was a rare beauty, likely in her mid-40s, her body alert, her movements self-aware, like an actress or dancer. She was wearing simple dark slacks and a tan-colored, v-neck sweater and had the polished look of wealth that signals unattainable dignity. Her jet-black hair was long and wavy, her lips full and her dark eyes calm. Her make-up was heavy, but tasteful. A wholesome beauty—it was as if she were created from a single cloth, showing no seams. She looked a bit like the Italian actress Monica Bellucci, who had had recently appeared in the movie The Matrix. To meet Monica on my night shift amidst underwear seemed itself akin to a trip into some kind of Matrix.

WHAT I WAS THINKING OF DURING THE FUNERAL SERVICE, DOUGLAS, ARIZONA by Gregory Djanikian

Gregory-Djanikian

WHAT I WAS THINKING OF DURING THE FUNERAL SERVICE,
DOUGLAS, ARIZONA
by Gregory Djanikian
for Wendy Glenn

Of course, death, how it wore
its outsize black hat to slice the day.

The mysterious abyss
of the body failing again,
falling into another body.

Not so much of resurrection
though it was spoken of, the oxen kneeling
in the straw, the stone rolled away.

The first death that had no likeness.
The earth that hath opened her mouth
to receive thy brother’s blood.
After which the history of departures
required a history of common prayer.

PILLS by Eliza Callard

PILLS
by Eliza Callard

Every day, I consume many colors--white and blue, pink,
translucent as a pale winter sun. Some I could crush
to a powder, some I could puncture and watch thick
red ooze smear my hands. Fat in the middle, round
like a flat earth, capsules you could shake like maracas.

I have ingested the weight equivalent of an adult male gorilla
or an anoa, from Indonesia (similar to the water buffalo).

I have swallowed one for every resident of
Copenhagen or the South American country of Suriname.

STAYING ON TRACK by Ori Fienberg

STAYING ON TRACK
by Ori Fienberg

Like his father, whenever he voiced a new idea a steam-engine-run train emerged from his mouth. It was possible to spot the idea coming, as his throat would glow and the area around him rumbled slightly. Specialists assured him there was no cause for alarm; it was a mysterious nuisance, but hereditary, and besides, the trains were quite small.

School discussion posed some difficulty as well. Fortunately, it was a well-documented condition, and so accommodation could be made; each room was equipped with a circular track, and he was given extra time to articulate particularly in-depth ideas, which could lead to additional cars, or a tiny, overly-energetic conductor, repeatedly pulling the train's whistle. Some ideas were like that.

It could get overwhelming: all those ideas: all those trains to maintain, or to find bearing down on him in the night. The trains kept irregular schedules, returning the next day, or much larger, years later. His father insisted that one day the trains would take him someplace, though he was vague on the exact details of the location.

COMPOST AND BAD POETRY by Diane Payne

COMPOST AND BAD POETRY
by Diane Payne

1.
The dogs and I walk to the neighborhood park and there are four cars in the parking lot; usually there are none. My first thought: Damn it, they’ve all killed themselves.

That’s what happens when there’s been a week filled with suicide.

Years ago, I remember walking to this park with my teenaged daughter. We noticed a car that appeared to be empty, yet moving. Curious, we peered through the window. The dogs started barking. The dogs were smarter than us. Embarrassed because they were classmates, my daughter took off running.

It had been too long for me, and yet never happened for she. Screw the words. This is one of those times when the universal bark of a dog says it all.

Today I take a long look at the parked cars. Not one car has a hose hooked to the window. No blood marks on the windshield. I don’t know why they are just sitting alone in their cars, not outside enjoying the park.

At least they are alive.

After finishing our walk through the neighborhood on the other side of the park, I notice the cars are still there. I check out the cars one more time, relieved to not see any dead bodies. Oddly enough, they all seem to be alone. No shaking cars. No hoses. No blood. Just four people sitting in their cars.

ROOTS by Helen Park

ROOTS
by Helen Park

You never realize how impoverished the soil is, how exhaustive the journey, for vineyard grapevines—how much they are forced to withstand to simply sustain themselves. Bob, our vineyard tour guide, explained in a hushed, deferential tone how large pieces of shale and rock are intentionally buried right underneath the roots of the grapevine so that they have no choice but to strain and stretch to painful lengths in order to reach the meager sources of water deep underground. The soil itself is as nutritionless as gravel.

“This is what must occur so that the grapes remain small and tight. If they were to be fed in abundance, watered with the generosity given to other crops, they would swell and dilute in flavor, intensity and depth.” Bob wagged his finger, “If you want to make great wine, the grapes must suffer.” He presented these facts with the utmost respect.

My brother and I had traveled to Northern California for a weeklong holiday and stayed for a few nights in the Mission District of San Francisco before driving up to Napa Valley. We were able to stay over a close family friend’s house while in the city. Our friend’s mom was an on-call nurse who was about to start a 12-hour shift at midnight that very evening, and although we arrived around 10 o’clock with very little notice, an enormous Vietnamese feast of jasmine rice, stir fried pork, steamed bok choy and tofu awaited us.

STEALING THE BOOK by Leonard Kress

STEALING THE BOOK
by Leonard Kress

What happened to my signed first edition of Auden?
Stolen, I suspect, though I lack any evidence.
An abomination--even medieval monks
formulated byzantine book-thievery curses:
For such a sin, let book worms and mites ingurgitate
broth brewed fresh from his hell-incinerated ashes.
But I am not full of vengeance and I wish no pain
on fellow bibliophiles, only that their hands do
quake and tremble, so that words squirm beyond discernment
when they read, that they become their own antonyms, that
sentences invert to palindromes, so star becomes
rats, straw becomes warts, and so that my book in their hands
is transformed into an altogether different book.

ESTHER FRIEDMAN by Michelle Taransky

ESTHER FRIEDMAN
by Michelle Taransky

There is always someone
Whose job it should be
To advise you, even if you don’t want to know:

No girl dreams of being proposed to
With a ring from the Shoah

Look to your mother
She cares so much it hurts

If you don’t want to have to describe
To your lover how
You want to be loved

PICK by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

PICK
by Mitchell Grabois

1.
You want me to hit you with a stick, but all I’ve got is a guitar pick. (Lou Reed)

2.
The gorilla, conscience of the world, sits and broods and ignores the humans pressed against the glass.

3.
The old is dying, the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms.(Gramsci)

4.
A splintered pick. Is it wood or some unfathomable synthetic? That’s the same question I ask about life. Are we God’s joke? Can I play guitar after my gall bladder surgery?

5.
The gorilla stuffs hay in his mouth. A little while later he lights himself on fire, using a pile of hay as accelerant. Where did he get a match? What cruelly sympathetic zookeeper conspired with him, or at least aided and abetted him?

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US by Samantha Memi

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US
by Samantha Memi

The real estate agent pulled at the hem of her skirt. In the shop she had thought it too short but her lack of inhibition after a couple of lunchtime drinks swayed her decision.

—I like your skirt, said the girl wanting a one-bedroomed flat.

—Oh, thank you, said the agent. —I got it at Reddy Teddy. You don't think it's too short?

—No, not at all.

—You need to be careful in this job. You don't want to seem too available.

—I'm sure you don't.

—The flat isn't far. Beaumont Avenue. Do you know it?

—No, I don't.

—It’s very nice, Edwardian. Quiet. It leads onto Baron’s Court Road, close to West Ken tube.

The two women left the agency and walked down Fulham Broadway. The agent, Marilyn, had recently divorced after fourteen years of childless marriage. She didn't want another relationship. Her client, Jane, had just returned from Spain where she had been teaching English, and she was looking for a place of her own as she was staying with plastic friends at the moment and her life was overcrowded.

THE VALLEY by Nick Kolakowski

Nick Kolakowski

THE VALLEY
by Nick Kolakowski

My father’s hair is a tuft of wolf fur; his clothes and body, a grimy rag wrapped around a charred bone; his arms, a stick tied crosswise to the bone with sinew. My mother is a dirt-stuffed sock topped with a tangle of red string, in a dress cut from an old skirt. My younger sister Edna is a shard of bark with a face drawn on it, in charcoal. My older sister Joy is an empty doll’s smock, because she is dead.

Edna hums to herself as she pieces together the last figurine from twigs and twine, packing the head with muddy cotton for a scraggly beard: me. The likeness is striking. We are too thin and dry and knobby, my effigy and I, and neither of us can move our legs.

I almost order Edna to throw her playmates in the fire and find us some food. But if I open my mouth, the words might snap the weak thread that holds her mind to the living world, and I will lose her forever. So I sit on the dirt floor of the cabin, in my stiff cocoon of blankets, and watch as she transforms our family stories into a puppet-play, voicing each of us in turn.

Our parents settled in this valley long before we were born, and built a cabin beside the wide, cold creek at its bottom. My father collected berries and shot animals with an old revolver. My mother tended the garden and three children, once we came along. Their earthly possessions amounted to a cast-iron skillet and a kettle, a skinning knife, two knitting needles, and an onionskin Bible. My mother taught us how to read from the book, and to write words on a board with bits of chalk. Eventually my father ran out of bullets for the pistol, but we still used the grip to beat rabbits and marmots to death, after we snared their legs in traps. Every few weeks my father carved a spear from a long branch and disappeared into the woods above the cabin, returning with armfuls of bloody venison. He made a fire by the creek and pushed the burning coals into a shallow pit, skewered the flesh on the spear and let it sizzle in the heat. We sat on boulders by the water and tore into that crackling feast, joking and laughing as the juices dripped down our chins. My mother used to tell us that everything outside our valley was poison, and how lucky we were to live here alone.

THE CORNER OF NUTLEY AVE by Tania Moore

THE CORNER OF NUTLEY AVE
by Tania Moore

Tito Angelini was asleep beside his wife, Francesca, when a loud banging, accompanied by a claw-like shaking on his arm intruded on his dreams.

“What, what?” he muttered, floundering into consciousness as he freed his arm from his wife’s grip and blinked into what appeared to be floodlights beaming into their second floor bedroom.

“Wake up! There’s someone at the door,” Francesca hissed as Tito groped for the clock, knocking it to the floor, but not before he caught a glimpse of the time, two fifteen a.m.

He stumbled out of bed and grabbed his robe.

“Who is it?” he yelled, descending the stairs as quickly as he was able. When he reached the vestibule he peered through the frosted, oval window of the front door, but could only make out shifting shadows behind the glass.

THE NUT KING by Necee Regis

THE NUT KING
By Necee Regis

Standing on the balcony on the twenty-seventh floor of a high-rise on Collins Avenue, the Nut King surveys his domain. The creamy-green Atlantic stretches flat to the horizon where it’s wedged against the cerulean sky so bright and hard—like the taffy you have to slap on the table to break—that the Nut King turns away, slides open the tall glass doors, and steps into the artificial air-conditioned coolness.

“Seen my sunglasses?”

Tracy shrugs. She’s applying the last coat of tangerine polish to her toenails and if she glances at him or gets up to walk around to look for them she’s certain to smear the third coat over the second to create a mottled mess more volcanic than smooth.

The Nut King shuffles over in his white bathrobe and slippers and plants a distracted kiss on the top of her head. His head sports a fuzzy ring of grey-turning-to-white hair around his balding pate, and his wire-rimmed reading glasses are pushed up on his forehead like an extra set of eyes. Otherwise he’s in decent shape for a man his age. At least he can get it up.

“Coming on the boat today?”

Tracy’s mouth contorts sideways, a cross between a pucker and a frown.

“I should go to the studio.”

THE ENERGIZER BUNNY LEADS A MARCH ON WASHINGTON by Kamden Hilliard

Kamden Hillard

THE ENERGIZER BUNNY LEADS A MARCH ON WASHINGTON
by Kamden Hillard

its about rhythm which is always about noise
because theres no better beacon
for all the revolution’s bodies

and because cable cant handle bass
it damn sure wont be televised

whats a hihat if you cant feel it rattle?
the tipsy thirst of rhythm? its about
reaching that soul and flirting it open
because if you havent been scalped
with sadness by a Four Page Letter
or welded to anger by Brenda’s Got a Baby

CONTROLLED BURN, WAKULLA SPRINGS, FLORIDA by Brenda Butka

CONTROLLED BURN, WAKULLA SPRINGS, FLORIDA
by Brenda Butka

Cypress knees gather on the riverbank
like penitents. Rags of moss
banner overhead, anoint
bulrushes and pickerelweed.

Wings spread to preach, the anhinga sits,
skinny, untidy on his branch.
His hot blue eye pinions passersby,
bream shuddering in the shadows.

A double handful of alligators,
still cute in their orange-striped
baby suits, tumble slowly
in the sand.

KITCHEN 1999 by Lisa Rowan

KITCHEN 1999
by Lisa Rowan

About once a month—not often enough, but still—her mother had taken a damp towel to the phone receiver. She pressed the threadbare cotton into the grooves of the earpiece, erasing the nights of sticky sweet teenage grease, still just a last bit innocent.

Long after she was gone, there were still signs of her all over the room. Scuffs on the rungs of the stool next to the phone, flakes of chipped nail polish, sloshed juice from plastic cups faded from the dishwasher on the linoleum, from nights of sitting in the dark because it felt more private. Footprints on the cabinet doors under the sink from soles propped against them while splayed across the floor on her back, feeling the cool tile. A weak cord that had been unspooled and rewrapped around fingertips a thousand times.

Theirs was the only house they knew without a cordless phone. Instead, a tether.

THUNDERBIRD by Nick Greer

THUNDERBIRD
by Nick Greer

THUNDERBIRD
by Nick Greer

The Ojibwa call it Animikii. The Tlingit call it Shangukeidí. The Kwakwaka'wakw call it Kwankwanxwalige', for the way it makes thunder (kʷənxʷa) lightweight (kʷəs) by pounding (ləka). No matter the tribe, its description is the same: a bird so large it creates thunder when it beats its wings. Dîné myth claims that thunderbirds live on a floating mountain Tse-an'-iska' (“A Tall Rock Standing”). They named the thunderbird Tse-nah-ale after the fashion in which they carry men to the top of the mountain and let them fall against it: tse (“rock”) + nah (“guide”) + ajei (“heart”). The hero Nayenezgami (“slayer of alien gods”) killed the thunderbird that preyed in their lands with an arrow made of lightning. As the bird fell off its mountain, smaller birds, what we now call bald eagles, flew from its wound.

Cryptozoologists were quick to connect these myths to reports of a massive bird: a wingspan up to 5.5 meters, indigenous to the more remote forests of North America, commonly encountered during storms. The most compelling and widely circulated hypothesis is that thunderbirds are the nearly extinct descendants of Teratornis (Greek, “monster bird”) merriami, thus explaining recurring reports of young children snatched from sandboxes. Fossilized “thunderbird” skeletons found in La Brea and Woodburn often circumscribe the skeletons of lesser animals, juvenile primates being most common.

UNTIL GWEN by Tina Mortimer

UNTIL GWEN
by Tina Mortimer

The display flashed "Great workout!" and a sense of dread dug its claws deep in my belly. I stepped off the treadmill feeling like I was still moving, my heart doing that flutter thing again. I waited for the sensation to pass. It always passed, I told myself. Always. Hadn’t the doctor said staying active would help improve my mood? If it was supposed to help, I wondered, then why did I feel like I’d just been punched in the gut?

The bathroom stall was dark, but not so dark that I couldn’t see the contrast of red on white. A single drop of blood stained my underwear. It was a mistake to run. I should have kept it to a brisk walk. Or better yet, I should have done something else on my lunch break.

The nurse on the other end of the line sounded distracted. "How much blood is there?"

Was she joking? Was there any good amount of blood for someone in my condition?

"Uh, a couple drops, but I’m not supposed to be bleeding, right?" I said.

She assured me that some spotting was normal, common even, but I should come in anyway, "just in case."

My husband met me in the doctor’s office waiting room. When the nurse called my name he squeezed my hand. "Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine," he said.

Everything was not fine.

AFTER DONNIE DARKO by Megan Magers

AFTER DONNIE DARKO
by Megan Magers

As the water spilled through the spout overhead, she replayed the idea again and again. A constant rush of thought, unbroken and hot. Don’t worry. You got away with it. She imagined scattering herself across the bottom of the tub, letting the soap residue wet the jet-lagged parts she’d become, turn them soft. Let them slip down the drain, flood the pipes. But she could only breathe steam and listen to the whirr of the vent. Everything was being recycled right then. Time and life and fear and air.

She was there, staring at the shadowed, tiled walls and she was already gone, waking up in a world without herself.

PALMS by Sara Siegel

PALMS
by Sara Siegel

Coe says that she reads palms, and we’re sitting over dumplings at a restaurant in Chinatown. Immediately I turn to her like a child, my fingers stretched out wide. She says that she can tell from the way that someone holds her hands if they really want their stories told. Most people, she says, shy away in fear. And those that don’t, those who open their hands to her, she says, would spend the night with her, and all she’d have to do is ask. But me, it’s not that I want to love her, or even for her to love me. Me, with my palms held open towards her, I want for her to give me to myself.

DINNER, WITH ALIEN ABDUCTION by Michael Daley

Michael-Daley

DINNER, WITH ALIEN ABDUCTION
by Michael Daley

We were speaking about the earthquake.
Some were in high school then, others on a farm,
one driving, a few forgot.
A big tv swung from a classroom wall.
Waves in the tulip fields, yellow and magenta,
we followed the trough and crest as one of us
rolled his hand above a plate of corn.
We have no tornados or hurricanes.
A blizzard’s an insult.
We have floods and fill sandbags—
for earthquakes, drills.

A SEA OF GURNEYS by Lisa Lynne Lewis

A SEA OF GURNEYS
by Lisa Lynne Lewis

A line of parents was already waiting in the assembly room by the time school let out for the day. Diane made her way through the rows of gurneys staffed by workers from the local blood bank, past the PTA volunteers wearing matching T-shirts that said, “What’s your type?”

The posters publicizing the blood drive were all over campus. Since the accident two weeks prior Thomas’ face had been everywhere, his blond hair hanging shaggily across one eye as he smiled for the camera. He was in her daughter Leila’s fifth-grade class. They’d gone to school together since kindergarten and had played on the same soccer team during first grade, the two of them standing next to each other in their team photo. How quickly he’d become the poster child for every parent’s nightmare, Diane thought.

The information had seeped in from multiple sources, each update adding a new terrible layer of specificity, hard-edged details glinting like shards of glass. A crossing-guard out sick that day; a car that came around the corner too fast. Thomas, already halfway across the street, unable to move out of the way in time. He’d been thrown onto the hood by the impact and lacerated his spleen. At his mother’s request, the PTA had quickly organized today's drive to support the blood bank that had been his lifeline at the hospital.

APHORISM by Dylan Weir

Dylan-Weir

APHORISM
by Dylan Weir

There but for the grace of
a gallon of vodka go I:
barleycorn barrel
rolling river roulette.
A hailstorm hitting the muzzles
of voiceless mothers watching
sons disappear. A cloud
of quiver hovering over
every bottle in the aisle
that follows me
to the checkout
counter cliff.

A FUNERAL ON THE COMPUTER by Michael Chaney

A FUNERAL ON THE COMPUTER
by Michael Chaney

She didn’t know how to tell her aging mother how they were doing it, James and his friends from the team. They were in the living room, snickering in their jerseys, going to that boy’s funeral—digitally. She was in the kitchen at a table with her mother and she knew she wouldn’t be able to convey to her the quadratic equation of the crash trajectory of a car in chrome and plastic, nor would she ace the quiz on tree ecology, about the way the chemical composition of bark repels beer swilling at 75 mph per square newtons of peer pressure per square Hyundai. At that rate, every pine is a Puritan, mad at machines and men and sometimes even cherubic goalies who whisper their prayers into push-ups every night and dream of one day visiting the Pacific Ocean. She didn’t know how to tell her mother why the boys had gone quiet in the other room, so that all you could hear was the periodic static of the waves, and how it probably started, the funeral they were at on the computer, the one they couldn’t afford to fly to in person.

THREE FLASH PIECES by Mercedes Lawry

THREE FLASH PIECES
by Mercedes Lawry

1.
Was there transposition?

Toby wondered why flies always died on their backs, or so it seemed. He had not conducted a scientific analysis or even done research on the suspect Internet. He was fully prepared to admit he’d made up the entire premise, simply because he’d observed a dead fly upon coming out of his bedroom, though he was pretty sure he’d come across other dead flies in this position. He had no idea, really, if the fly had died on that spot or elsewhere, say, the windowsill, where so many did, no doubt yearning. A stray breeze might have wafted it to the floor. A sneeze. Another fly tired of looking at the corpse. He felt fairly certain the fly had not been there when he went to bed last night but he would not have sworn an oath.

Could a coroner determine when the fly had died or if it had been a natural death? And what was a natural death for a fly, old age? Malnutrition? Did flies that inadvertently found their way inside have shorter lives than those who remained in the wild? Toby could certainly understand why someone might choose the fly as a compelling subject to explore. There were so many questions to be answered. He supposed, as in all fields of study, one question led to another and soon one might be inquiring about the pill bug or beetles. Should one become a generalist or a specialist and which was more rewarding, more intellectually challenging, which garnered more respect?

LETTING IT BE by Stephen D. Gutierrez

LETTING IT BE
by Stephen D. Gutierrez

They had reason to be in California at the same time, and loved the Central Valley, on the way to Yosemite, and us.

“They’re coming?”

“Yes, they are!”

“At the same time?
“Yup.”

“How weird!”

“Yup.”

“Yeah,” we said, on the phone. “You can come. We’re ready for you.”

We got excited about a nice meal in the backyard, a barbecue, with me in a chef’s apron I hadn’t used, a silly one, and a Weber, still virginal, and tidied up the house, and bought plenty of cheeses and crackers, and fluffed up the beds in the separate rooms – two true pals, they wouldn’t pad down the hall to a cracked-open door showing light inside, asking for a spare toothbrush or something, ah ha – and stocked decaf for one, and tea for the other.

“Boy, it’s almost time.”

BLACK WINGS FLAPPING by Shmu’el Bashevis Ben’yamin

BLACK WINGS FLAPPING
by Shmu’el Bashevis Ben’yamin

I had the ingredients of becoming a perfect milksop, but it didn’t happen. Every day I carried to school an orange ball bigger than my head, and at lunch watched long-legged teenagers with patchy facial hair and funny white boots borrow the ball to put it through a bent rim. The ball was named after my uncle Wilson. I had found it buried under the yellow flowers of a California pepper tree. My hands itched all day after scrubbing it with laundry detergent, and my feet hurt when I kicked it against my aunt’s garage door.

The young men multiplied faster than tree rabbits. They started as two-on-two, then three-on-three. After a few more days, they played a full court press of five-on-five, hooped back and forth while other children picket-fenced the sidelines, waiting to be picked. Girls perched on top of an aluminum bleacher. They had wavy canary feathers for hair. They hardly paid attention and did not cheer. I sat on the bottom row and absorbed their singsongs without looking at them.
I didn’t speak much. I was immersed in ESL classes where Spanish became the lingua franca. That went on for several months before realizing that The Jetsons on television sounded foreign in English. I did well in Spanish and Mathematics. Everything else I failed that term.

I don’t remember the exact day, but for hours the sun’s sulfur carbonized our heads. No one really wanted to play except me. Sweat had already covered my body and dripped from my forehead before even touching the ball. On the court, I flew like a black-billed magpie among white storks, stealing the ball from Michael, dribbling between the legs of David, the tallest stork, lobbing it over Daniel, swish and score. I lost two kilos that day from being in the outdoor incubator, but it didn’t matter—we were the champ.

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