GOOD ON PAPER, a novel by Rachel Cantor reviewed by Lillian Brown

From Rachel Cantor, the lauded author of the 2014 novel A Highly Unlikely Scenario, comes a novel of New Life, a journey of personal resurrection, Good on Paper. Much of the novel is a meditation on fidelity, in relationships and in translations, and it brings to the page some of the most interesting personalities and family dynamics so far this year in literature.

The characters and their relationships make this story of literary delight: Shira, the protagonist, a translator and single mother; Ahmad, her gay best friend and co-parent; Andi, her young and sharp daughter; Romei, the illustrious, Nobel prizing-winning poet, both on the phone and the page; Benny, the owner of the neighborhood bookstore People of the Book, publisher of the local literary magazine Gilgul, part-time love interest of Shira, and the very person to connect Shira and Romei. Good on Paper serves as a reminder of the power of connections, between both people and words.

A PhD dropout and SuperTemps veteran, Shira spends much of her time contemplating the impending Y2K (the novel is set in the late nineties) and the nature of love in its various forms, when she receives a mysterious telegram. The note is from the famous poet Romei, who requests that Shira translate his most recent work. She’s shocked, and even believes it's a joke at first, courtesy of Benny, but quickly realizes the good fortune of the situation, and accepts the offer.

THE ETERNAUT, a graphic narrative by Héctor Germán Oesterheld reviewed by Natalie Pendergast

Deadly, beautiful “flakes” falling gently, the bodies they touch folding neatly to the ground. The light thrower, a powerful weapon that spotlights your death, as though stage fright wasn’t real enough. Sinister devices “plugged in” to the necks of robot men, long before The Matrix was even a twinkle in the Wachowski Brothers’ eye. All of these: combining to form layers of artful threats to your well-being, like different sections of an orchestra imbricated and inter-punctuated to form a unified song. This is the world we enter upon reading the Eternaut’s, also known as Juan Salvo’s, recounted story. More: hallucinogenic, mind-controlling biological warfare, the telecommunication gadgets that dreams are made of, fifth column military pursuits by alien “hands,” enraged “gurbos” and an enemy automaton disguised as an attractive woman. A faraway extraterrestrial empire has designs on colonizing not only as many planets as possible, but also on pillaging the galaxy’s resources by picking pockets of time throughout eternity. Navigating this same eternity is the Eternaut. A displaced person in space, he borrows somewhere to sit from other slots in time, so as not to allow for his own vanishing. Set in “today”—or late 1950s Buenos Aires—The Eternaut, both man and story, arrives like a hologram in the office chair facing writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld. Together with Oesterheld, we are just one stop among many on his sempiternal journey.

BLOOD HYPHEN, poems by Kenny Williams, reviewed by J.G. McClure

Frost said that, like an ice cube on a hot stove, a poem must ride on its own melting. It’s an apt description of the poems in Kenny Williams’ Blood Hyphen, winner of the 2015 FIELD Poetry Prize. Take the book’s opening poem, “About the Author,” which begins:

The genius of Diogenes:
all his books are lost.
But really that’s the genius
of the books and not the man.
If I can speak for the man,
his diet of worms and onions
makes me feel like a pig
when I go to the store
and it’s midnight
and the store is closing.

Riding on its own melting, the poem proceeds by continuously undermining itself. The genius of Diogenes isn’t really the genius of Diogenes but rather the genius of his books—all of which are lost. So to be ingenious, a piece of writing should not exist—a darkly funny argument that undermines the very act of writing the poem in the first place. The speaker then proposes to “speak for the man” Diogenes—but does no such thing, instead talking about his own experience in the grocery store.

ALMOST EVERYTHING VERY FAST, a novel by Christopher Kloeble, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Like the best coming-of-age stories, Christopher Kloeble’s Almost Everything Very Fast addresses universal concerns by asking personal questions. Nineteen-year-old Albert, raised in an orphanage, wants to know why he was given up by his anonymous mother and the father he knows: Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes, a grown man with a childlike mind. Albert has gotten nowhere by following the “Hansel and Gretel crumbs” he’s found in Fred’s attic: a photo of Fred with a red-haired woman, a few auburn hairs plucked from a comb. When Fred’s terminal illness imposes an urgent deadline, Albert visits him in Königsdorf one last time—but his “infinite questions” lead to still more questions: What is love? In what ways do family ties bind us? Is nurturing natural? Do parents cause their children more harm than good?

In Segendorf, Fred’s ancestral village, to love is to discard. For nearly 400 years, residents have been compelled to hurl their Most Beloved Possessions off the rocky bluff of the highest hill at the annual Sacrificial Festival. During one such celebration in 1912, incestuous (and murderous) twins Jasfe and Josfer Habom conceive a son, Julius, whose birth brings shame but also relief: the baby is not a “Klöble”—the local term for the “clumsy, stupid fellows” who “test a parent’s love.” Unknotted from their lineage—their mother died in childbirth and Josfer kills their disapproving father—they are scorned by hypocritical neighbors in a village where inbreeding is a cultural norm.

Their second child, Anni, orphans herself and her brother by burning down the family’s home with their beloved parents inside. Julius takes off with Wickenhäuser, the town mortician, who offers the boy as a companion to his war-widowed mother Else (Julius’s “first love”), to pay for freedom from filial responsibility. Back home, Anni wastes away until she marries Arkadiusz Driajes and gives birth to the Klöble-esque Fred, rekindling her brother’s covetous love. Meanwhile, Julius impregnates a woman he doesn’t love—the devoted Mina, who gives birth to Ludwig, who will one day marry Klondi, who loves the idea of motherhood but can’t stand the scent of her actual daughter, Marina.

SEEKING CHILDHOOD by Nathaniel Popkin

SEEKING CHILDHOOD
by Nathaniel Popkin

In early 1951, when the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis was almost eleven, he came home from playing soccer with friends and, following a vague urge, took his brother’s shotgun to the yard. He shot into the air, scattered the birds aloft from the sapodilla tree, and dropped the shotgun to the ground. The gun fired and struck Aridjis in the stomach. He barely survived. The accident, writes Chloe Aridjis, his daughter, “cleaved in two” his life and sealed off his early childhood “like a locked garden.” In the aftermath of the accident, Homero Aridjis began reading and writing in earnest, the crucible of an astonishingly prolific career, but without access to memories of his own boyhood.

Twenty years after the gun accident, with his wife, Betty Ferber, pregnant with Chloe, the couple’s first child, Aridjis began to have “astonishingly vivid dreams” of his childhood. These dreams unlocked the garden of memory. He eventually recounted them in a slender memoir of childhood, El poeta niño, published in 1991. Now, Chloe Aridjis, the author of the novel Book of Clouds, has produced an English translation, The Child Poet, brought out by Archipelago Books this month.

I am particularly hungry for this book because my own childhood is locked away, and my writing suffers for it. It isn’t clear why—there is nothing so acute as a gun accident in my history.

My mother, like Aridjis nearing 76, is the keeper of the garden. She calls me with “sad news.” Stephen, a friend from when I was six, has died. “You remember playing with him, don’t you?” she says. I shrug, not because I’m callous, but because I can only conjure a vague image of a yard, a dark kitchen. Nothing about the boy. Another time she says she’s run into my third grade teacher, Mrs. So-and-So. “She was the one who got you interested in books.” Oh?

ENIGMAS, poems by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, reviewed by Justin Goodman

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz remains Mexico’s greatest mystery. Born in 1651 out of wedlock and between social classes, intensely devoted to knowledge—having had discussions with Isaac Newton—and to Catholicism, she died forty-four years later despised by the male authorities of the church, but canonized as part of the literary godhead of the Spanish Golden Age. The haziness of these seeming contradictions evoked in the glorious 20th century Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, a sensation of the enigmatic which he captured in “Wind, Water, Stone”: “Each is another and no other.” It’s appropriate, then, to see Enigmas publication; it is a work whose title is a reflection on both de la Cruz’s existence and poetry, and also on the amorphous gulf between language and meaning that translators of poetry attempt to concretize.

At least that’s what Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal seems to get at in her manifesto-ish “Translator’s Not-(Subtractive Letter).” Much as she describes her aesthetic decisions, “through Neo-Baroque deletion of first person yet a postmodern acceptance of my identity,” the note evokes the characteristically astringent intellect of poststructural feminism. Also in Villarreal’s note, she insists her “polar associations to sound and form” embodies Gloria Anzaldúa.” I could go deeper down the spiral, citing Villarreal’s interest in “all of Sor Juana’s enigma translations…hyperlinked to each other” and her obligation “to pick a unifying aesthetic that would point to naked sound.” All I’ll say, however, is that Engimas is szygy: the rare coincidence of planetary alignment.

IN OTHER WORDS, essays by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed by Michelle Fost

In Other Words, a departure for Jhumpa Lahiri as she turns for the first time to memoir, took shape as weekly writing assignments—in Italian—that were published over six months in the Italian magazine Internazionale. Regular deadlines and the constraint of writing in a language she was still learning re-energized Lahiri. These very personal pieces are framed and contained self-portraits. They are fascinating, focused, and at times repetitive, and give the sense of a complex literary artist with a passion for language.

Part of Lahiri’s accomplishment in In Other Words is her recovery of a way of working that is unspoiled by the expectations of a demanding readership. I thought of a story told to me by an early childhood educator about a child who loved to paint. An adult, looking at the child’s work asked, “Is that a flower?” Is that the sun? What a beautiful yellow.” For weeks, the child, now self-conscious, did not return to paint. Lahiri’s project is a return to a literary garden, a place where she is free to play with language and expression in a way that is full of joy, discovery, and personal satisfaction. Lahiri generously invites the reader to share this pleasurable experience.

THE LAST WEYNFELDT, a novel by Martin Suter, reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

THE LAST WEYNFELDT
by Martin Suter
translated by Steph Morris
New Vessel Press, 302 pages

reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Martin Suter’s The Last Weynfeldt is an impressive work of intrigue and beauty. It sparks at the intersection of two very different people, Adrian Weynfeldt, mid-fifties, internationally renowned art expert, and Lorena, a shoplifting, small-time model who rips Adrian from his carefully crafted still life.

Adrian earns his living by putting a “fair” price on beauty, authenticity, and originality. Lorena, often an anonymous commodity as a model, is also a thief, a woman who never pays society’s agreed upon price. And it’s through these differences—along with a whole host of other artists, liars, grifters, and moochers—that Suter brings out the novel’s central conflict between authenticity and forgery, the mass-produced and the one-of-a-kind.

Of Lorena, Suter asks what does it do to a person to be dismissed as little more than copy or commodity:

In the streetcar to the exhibition center [Lorena] took a free newspaper from the dispenser and sat down cautiously on one of the hard seats.

Her picture was on the cover. Wrapped around the Ducelli in a provocative pose, with a seductive look for the camera. The caption read: “Superbike with ultra-transparent chassis and high-torque motor: the new Ducelli 7312.”

She read the article carefully; she wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the main text either. Not even as an accessory, not even as something which stopped you from getting a good look at the bike. It was as if she didn’t exist.

But just as Lorena longs to exist, to matter to someone, to matter to herself, Adrian is only too happy to remain locked up in the tradition-built cages of routine and old money.

ABDUCTING A GENERAL, a memoir by Patrick Leigh Fermor, reviewed by Rory McCluckie

ABDUCTING A GENERAL
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
NYRB, 206 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

In 1933, aged only 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor began walking from Rotterdam to Constantinople. Clad in an old greatcoat and a pair of hobnail boots, he had left his native England on the deck of a Dutch steamer and set off on foot with a few letters of introduction, some notebooks, and a copy of Horace's Odes in his rucksack, It was an extraordinary thing to undertake but we've long known that Leigh Fermor was an extraordinary man; a skilled linguist, a vivid, ebullient writer, and a lover of literature, people, and the world in all its variable wonder—of life, essentially—he has become celebrated for enjoying an existence so improbably charmed that his travel books often read like stirring, romantic fictions.

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Leigh Fermor—then living in Romania—returned home and was accepted as a candidate for a commission in the Irish Guards, a posting he quickly came to regard as dull. It was with some relief, then, when the Intelligence Corps took note of his lingustic capabilities and offered him courses in military intelligence and interrogation before dispatching him, in 1940, to the Mediterannean as a member of the British Military Mission.

At this point, Greece had been invaded by Italy and it was the Mission's primary responsibility to help the occupied country in any way they could. In April 1941, this difficult task was rendered almost impossible when a German blitzkrieg tore through the Balkans, forcing most of Britain's troops from the European mainland. Some, Leigh Fermor among them, managed to flee to Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, and were soon treated to a fresh barrage by the Nazis who, sensing an advantage, sought to capitalize. While the islanders' resistance was noble, the outcome was inevitable; luckily for the author, the Royal Navy evacuated him to Egypt before the Axis powers could impart a less merciful fate, and it was in Cairo that Leigh Fermor proposed a plan to return to Crete in order to kidnap a German general.

HERE COME THE DOGS, a novel by Omar Musa, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

HERE COME THE DOGS
by Omar Musa
The New Press, 330 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

You had to be there. Right? That's how these things work—the magic of moments strung together, a shared lexicon, the bond of shared origins. Omar Musa's brilliant first novel Here Come The Dogs unpicks the rough, multifaceted hip-hop culture of small-town Australia. Immediate and compelling, this one deserves a place on the shelf next to Trainspotting or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Both a snapshot of a specific time and place, and an examination of the broadness of humanity, Here Come The Dogs is filled with stinging insights, delivered in freestyle and lyric prose.

In hip-hop, context is everything. Those who know, know. Inside that world—word battles and swag weed—a man can be a prince if he spits good rhyme. Outside, it's a different story. The guy dominating the mic last night is waiting to wash your car windows this morning. Who is underneath the shiny props and thick black tattoos?

Solomon, Jimmy, and Aleks—one Samoan, one Macedonian, and one unknown—waste time being cool in small ways. They're half-assing it, diverting their hustle to greater things in the way that artists do. One has a part-time dishwashing gig, one plays the middle man for the local drug traders. Around them, the world is shrinking into a shape that doesn't have space for three men like them. “Every fire dies, every story, every star, every town. Every nation? Childhoods are macadamed beneath asphalt and paint rolls, but just for other childhoods to exist. This, the nature of change, of modernity.” The friends struggle at the fringes to keep their fire alive.

It's a shit life, and they know it, but at the same time, what's the alternative? Their words make them powerful—turn them into a secret tribe. You had to be there, the rhymes assert. Who's the outsider? Who doesn't get it, now?

A GIRL ON THE SHORE, a graphic narrative by Inio Asano, reviewed by Helen Chazan

A GIRL ON THE SHORE
by Inio Asano
Vertical Comics, 406 pages

reviewed by Nathan Chazan

In a 2013 interview, Inio Asano cites learning the phrase “chunibyo” as an inspiration for A Girl on the Shore. A Japanese meme, “chunibyo” translates roughly to “Eighth Grader Syndrome,” and describes an early adolescent’s tendency to aspire to and imitate the adult behaviors that she is too young to understand. The comic, a direct and emotionally intense story about two early adolescents who enter a sexual relationship, functions as a parable of “chunibyo,” exploring this youthful desire to seem more mature as well as its consequences. In contrast to this motif, A Girl on the Shore is a deceptively mature accomplishment, employing the techniques of commercial manga to the greatest level of sophistication to convey the searing anxieties of adolescence.

This is a graphic novel about two teenagers, Koume and Keisuke, who decide to start having sex when they are very young. Both are haunted by recent trauma: Koume by her rape at the hands of a popular kid named Misaki, and Keisuke by the absence of his deceased older brother. The two youths enter this relationship believing it will be strictly sexual, an escape from normal life without emotional baggage. However, no relationship can really be casual at such a young age, and they soon must deal with the feelings brought out by their connection. It’s a relationship that is never romantic until its very end, a relationship Asano describes as “a love story in reverse.”

THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE, a graphic narrative by Riad Sattouf, reviewed by Jesse Allen

THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE
by Riad Sattouf
Metropolitan Books, 160 pages

reviewed by Jesse Allen

As a memoir of childhood, color plays a prominent role in Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. Different locations and environments take on a range of hues, beginning with the blunt red-black-and-green cover. On it, Gaddafi’s handsome and commanding image on a billboard salutes Riad’s parents as they walk past while he, uncolored, rides his father’s shoulders. He looks to the salute as if it were another adult doting on him, a golden haired child. Over the course of the memoir, scenes that take place in France are colored in blue, while those in Libya and Syria are colored in yellow and red respectively.

Reds and greens also offset memories when contrast is needed to elicit a moment of childhood awareness: the red of Riad's father Abdel’s radio announcing the political news that directs Abdel and his family’s life, green signaling a televised broadcast of Gaddafi’s state speech in Libya as well as the angry words of a Libyan waiting in line for state rationed bananas, which, too, are colored green, and red for Syrian army berets and broadcasts of Hafez al-Assad’s state propaganda. These seemingly minor details are key signifiers to what is remembered in sentiment even as they recount a larger reality and history.

While chronicling his “childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984,” Sattouf builds his story around his father Abdel’s journey as an academic and a family man. Abdel’s pride in his Syrian roots and in the Arab world in general is emblematic “of Syrians of his generation,” yet his ideals are often challenged by the realities of the Arab world. In Libya, Riad recalls the socialist vision of Gaddafi and how “housing for all citizens” meant that any apartment was free to commandeer if no one was home or locked inside. Abdel finds this out the hard way when his family is forced to look for a new flat immediately after another has settled into their space.

OUT OF DARKNESS by Ashley Hope Pérez reviewed by Leticia Urieta

OUT OF DARKNESS
by Ashley Hope Pérez
Carolrhoda LAB, 402 pages

reviewed by Leticia Urieta

Out of Darkness is broken into parts: before the disaster and after. This compelling novel is rooted in history, and the book begins with the aftermath of the 1937 New London school explosion in East Texas and a town reeling from disaster. Volunteers move debris, collect the severed limbs of school children, and build caskets for the dead. The narrative voice embodies the horror, the grief, and the growing need for someone to blame. This is how the story begins, with a sense of impending doom, and this feeling of dread pervades the rest of the novel, the “before”, leading up to the “after.”

The story encompasses a school year, oscillating between the third person points of view of a family hoping to make a new start. Naomi Vargas moves to New London from San Antonio with her twin brother and Sister, Beto and Cari, to live with their father, her stepfather, Henry Smith. From the beginning, the rules are clear; no Spanish at school or around town; watch where you go; attend church revivals and socialize with the locals. New London is an oil town, a white town, and Naomi is immediately aware of how she doesn’t fit. Henry changes her siblings’ names to Robbie and Carrie Smith and expects her to keep his house, get to know the church wives, and learn how to cook proper southern food and biscuits, not tortillas. Each short vignette is set in one perspective at a time. And the hopes and fears of this new life are revealed.

Naomi fears living with Henry, the stepfather who has sexually abused her as a child, and being responsible for her twin siblings now that her mother, Estella, is gone. She hears Henry’s promises, the born again song and dance that he performs, but is constantly triggered by his presence. Henry is filled with self-righteousness, that this is God’s plan for his redemption from a life of drinking and sin. Beto, the sensitive, quiet twin, loves the new encyclopedias he gets to read at the new white school, and the childhood wonders of a new place, and new possibilities.

LOSE 7 by Michael DeForge reviewed by Helen Chazan

LOSE 7
by Michael DeForge
Koyama Press, 52 pages

reviewed by Nathan Chazan

The most recent installment of Michael Deforge’s one-man anthology series Lose features three new stories from the artist: two shorter pieces surrounding a longer work, which form a sort of triptych. Unlike earlier issues, Lose 7 lacks a subtitle alluding to a loose theme connecting the stories within (“The Fashion Issue” and “The Clubs Issue”). But if I were to choose a title for this seventh issue I might go with “The Growing Up Issue”, or perhaps “The Dysphoria Issue”. The three stories reflect how identities are constructed and the feelings of detachment and anxiety that accompany such journeys of self-definition.

The first story, untitled in this volume but previously published on Deforge's Patreon page as “Adults”, depicts a children’s game in which a boy instructs a girl on how to pretend to be his mother. The two run through town proclaiming their false identities, fraught with the fear and excitement of fooling the outside world. The parody turns into a nightmare as the “mother’s” literally swelled head assumes and reverses the previously established power dynamic, becoming a brute force of the parental aggression the kids had been imitating.

With his friend, the boy creates a new version of his mother to boss around and power that he could not experience in his real family. In the hands of a child, this adult power—the very bossiness he hoped to escape—becomes terrifying. Deforge illustrates his work with garish primary colors and rough lines drawn over his minimal, schematic forms, suggesting that an actual child has traced over his artwork: every form intact, and yet ever-so-slightly off. The images in “Adults” are so loud they seem to scream. They evoke the bodily monstrosities of Deforge’s early work while keeping those eruptions contained—but just barely.

The longest and most thematically complex of the triptych, “Movie Star”, is the story of Kim, a young woman who discovers a schlocky sci-fi film featuring an actor who looks almost identical to her deadbeat dad, Louis. Her father denies the resemblance at first, but when the actor, a former professional wrestler named Gregory Tan, enters their lives, the two men become fast friends. Louis idolizes Gregory, who is revealed to be his long-lost older brother. After several strange episodes it becomes clear that the two have formed a new “whole” identity in which one man is inseparable from the other, like an actor and a stunt double in a film.

POENA DAMNI TRILOGY by Dimitris Lyacos reviewed by Justin Goodman

POENA DAMNI TRILOGY
Z213: EXIT, 95 pages
WITH THE PEOPLE FROM THE BRIDGE, 61 pages
THE FIRST DEATH, 35 pages
by Dimitris Lyacos
translated by Shorsha Sullivan
Shoestring Press

reviewed by Justin Goodman

“What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?”

In France, in 1960, this question pressed itself upon the Romanian-born Emil Cioran. Histoire et Utopie was published, likely to the same acclaim (and rejection of acclaim) that marked all Cioran's career after 1950. Six years later and southeasterly, Dimitris Lyacos would be born in Athens. Despite the distance, Lyacos' recently translated Poena Damni trilogy revels inside Cioran's head.

The composite units: Z213:EXIT, With the People From The Bridge, and The First Death, are ridden with the lack of euphony that belongs to the invisible canon of defeat to which Cioran belongs. Understanding is a place, for those of this school of thought, towards which knowledge only exacerbates the distance.

The translator of the triology, Shorsha Sullivan, who is also a Classics professor at Leeds College, distinguishes Lyacos from the Greek poets that “slide easily into the mainstream of European Modernism” and those localized poets whom “lose [their] savour in translation.” “Lyacos' case differs,” Sullivan continues, because “he speaks to us as fellow human beings from an almost non-local viewpoint, using western tradition but not committing himself to any side.”

It does make one wonder what can be said of the Ancient Greek traditions Lyacos borrows heavily from: the Chorus in the trilogy’s second installment, With the People From the Bridge, comes to mind; the odyssey of Z213:EXIT; the brutal abstractions of Greek sculpture in The First Death; and how this contingency is taken into account when writing “a version that could possibly make sense in the context of our own tradition.” But Sullivan lets this doubt suffice as an answer: “Could this version have been produced originally in English?” Recognizing the fact fails to answer it, let alone, comfort us; only discomfort translates, bringing Poena Damni to a truly real fluid-filled birth.

BREATH TO BREATH by Craig Lew reviewed by Heather Leah Huddleston

BREATH TO BREATH
by Craig Lew
Little Pickle Press, 432 pages

reviewed by Heather Leah Huddleston

Seventeen-year-old William has been dealt a bad hand in life. Raised for as long as he can remember by his grandparents, Gramps dies and G’ma can’t take care of him, so William is shipped from Kansas to California to live with his estranged father. He has no real memories of his mother, except the fictionalized ones he makes up for his friends. And there’s this: he has a history of violence; he nearly killed someone in Kansas.

The novel unfolds like both a mystery and a coming-of-age story as he tries to come to an understanding of who he really is. Though violence seems to follow him, we learn that the violence has a reason; he saves a girl from being raped; he saves a boy from being beaten by bullies; he saves himself after being finger raped by the captain of the football team. Within the gray area surrounding all the violence lies the question: is there ever a time when violence is okay? Or at least understandable?

William’s sleep is haunted by nightmares of whales being hacked to death by faceless people and his waking moments are haunted by the vision of a four-year-old boy, Patches, who both reveals himself to William and hides from him just as quickly. On their initial meeting, the boy tells William that he is being sexually abused and, each time William catches a glimpse of the boy’s red shirt or hears his familiar giggle, he chases him in order to help him. The more William asks questions about him around the neighborhood, however, the less the boy seems to exist. And then there’s the mysterious blue-eyed dog that guides him, not only to Patches, but, to other people who need his help.

A HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME by David Gates reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

A HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME
by David Gates
Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages

reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is a short story collection that offers a rare pleasure: the possibility of reading it cover to cover, leaping from one story to the next.

Some readers, including this one, may want to protest the gallery of rogue characters David Gates presents in this new collection perhaps enough to wonder who Gates hangs out with. I’m reminded of the scene from the film Ocean’s 11 when Julie Roberts’ character says to George Clooney, who plays Danny Ocean, “Your problem is you’ve met too many people like you.” Some of these characters’ habits and inclinations, reflections and bitter asides, are just this side of depraved (or perhaps for some people, the other side of depraved). Indeed, the people in Gates’ stories can wear a bit, with their biting sarcasm and world-weariness.

Yet there is no denying the sure hand behind these stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Gates knows his characters so well that the descriptions and stories feel chiseled like sculpture. In the case of Lily, the protagonist of the story “A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens,” one is tempted to think Gates has compiled a fictitious Netflix account for her. Clearly he’s had the fortune or misfortune of knowing exactly the kind of families who send their children to Brearley, Dalton, and other New York City private schools. The kind of families who know people called Portia and who can be found “doing coke…in the bathroom at Portia’s wedding.” Lily lives in Brooklyn Heights, and casually mentions at one point sharing “a taxi back to Brooklyn with Portia’s married boyfriend” and then sharing some illicit affection, which sets off a torrent of emails from the boyfriend.

DOG MEMORIES by Doug Ramspeck

DOG MEMORIES
by Doug Ramspeck

It must be the stillness of a morning sky, the repose of grass in a field beyond a fence, or maybe the kitchen floor where my father is forever dying of a heart attack when I am five, fat doves singing outside the windows of our rental house in rural Ohio. It seems possible to remember the half-life of light on a leaf outside my childhood bedroom window in dead summer, to construct an impression from the mud of the river or the black clothes of the mourners, to dream an open maw of earth. My memories of my father are as imprecise as footprints filling with snow, though I do recall, a few months later, a bulldog coming toward me—after we were evicted from the rental home—on the porch of my grandfather’s house, the creature lunging then hovering above me. In my vision the beast snares me with his great teeth pressed against my neck, though years later my mother claims the dog was simply exuberant with friendliness and knocked me down. But if I close my eyes, I feel the animal heat of breath against my skin, the sharpness of teeth. Or maybe, it sometimes seems, memories transform to living organisms, evolving or devolving, breathing and letting go, asserting whatever volition they can. I am eleven when my mother’s live-in boyfriend begins locking our German shepherd in the basement, which is a sign, we know, that he plans to beat one of us, or maybe both. The basement, as I remember it, is small and low-slung, with bare cement and a naked light bulb, cobwebs having their conversations with the hot or cold air breathing through the vents. I remember blood oozing from my mother’s nose, the swollen baptism of an eye, the dustiness of memory growing more opaque yet powerful with decades, as though the past becomes a dust devil swirling its magic in August, rising from the dry earth to make itself into a living being. We are homeless, then, residing in my mother’s car, the cold winter air a judgment. Once my mother is given a frozen turkey at a food pantry, and we bring it back to the Ford, uncertain how to cook it. I remember how heavy the turkey feels when I hold it in my lap, and I recall—digging deep into memory—building a fire from sticks and discarded newspapers and whatever dry wood we can find at the roadside. And then a skinny man with a white beard and a voice like a rabid dog is stopping his motorcycle by the bar ditch and stealing the turkey from us before we have even found a way to place it above the flames. Blood trails its offering down my mother’s forearm after the man lunges at her with a box cutter. And now, rising in my vision, is the man racing off on his motorcycle with our turkey clutched like a sleeping infant in one arm.

ANGEL OF THE MERIDIAN by Samuel Hovda

ANGEL OF THE MERIDIAN
by Samuel Hovda

Step out of the cave of my mouth.

Wear your golden earrings
like snakes eating.
Put on your

purple eye shadow.
The daggers

have mostly withdrawn,
green of the vipers fallen off.
A few stray villages at night
with stones,
palm-sized and ready,

but you’re the robin
in the morning

unaware of the innards
of their dark bedrooms.

TRIP by Rheea Mukherjee

TRIP
by Rheea Mukherjee

The door that led into the house my parents owned in Denver needed an extra nudge for it to open. Once prodded, a bell attached to the knob jingled before you could set foot on the white tiles. This jingle, the thrust of the door, was a short prelude to the potent smell of mutton being fried in canola oil. The smell of curried meat, intense and intrusive, compared to the odorless winter air outside. Clumps of snow would fall from the sides my boots onto the floor as we took off layers of sweaters and coats.

For me there would be vegetarian dishes. My father always made sure of that. He wearing shorts that reached his knees, his elbow poking against the thickness of masala vapors, stirring his curry, a universe of flavors condensed into an offering of love. The TV in the living room was massive, reminiscent of the American suburban nineties. CNN or some other news channel would be blaring, and the house not yet warmed enough for a Colorado winter, would temper the spattering of oil.

This is how I remember of my father. Not because there wasn’t more. Not because I don’t remember other things. Like him driving his car, his head attached to a cell phone, bantering to clients in Hindi or English about real estate: houses, liquor stores, another closing. Not because I don’t remember vividly him telling us ghost stories when I was eight, coddled by pillows, in the backseat of our car being driven somewhere in Georgia, one of the many family road trips that entailed pit stops at gas stations and the endless tar of an American interstate highway. Not because I don’t remember him telling me that it was not possible I had gotten three C’s in Social Studies, Math and Science in 4th grade, I had studied too hard. Because I do remember him marching up to my favorite teacher, Mrs. Berks, who looked up my tests frantically and then realized that it was true. I had gotten straight A’s that year and she had made a mistake, a miracle I still can’t fathom. Only he knew.

EPISTLE TO THE COPS ON A WINTRY NIGHT by Cal Freeman

EPISTLE TO THE COPS ON A WINTRY NIGHT
by Cal Freeman

Dear historical ambling
in that souped-up Ford, dear steel
gaze hidden behind tinted glass,
keeping these hours, everything
is a question of before
or after dawn. Your briefs spell out
blank descriptions of men
whose retreating shadows have been glimpsed
at the scenes of nearly-executed crimes;
not sour breath, red-eyed, and wandering,
but black male on foot, possibly armed,
suspicious. Before dawn,
those hours between bar
and liquor store, when the nerves pull taut
and the birds start with their racket,
crepuscular hours no do-gooder is awake to bless
when the dreams of the civic mind
grow skittish with wild imaginings.

FUCKED & THE INNOCENT by Marc Harshman

TWO FLASH STORIES BY MARC HARSHMAN

I. Fucked

He is deaf from the whining scream of the chainsaw, and is sweating under a thinning, November sun. There must have been some way to avoid this hellhole in the Middle East. When he had seen the pictures on the screen last night, something had knotted in his belly. But here, at least, this morning, the work felt good, the bright, interior heart of the tree exposed like this. Fuck politics. There were wormholes. Some people liked them in their furniture. Antique. He was fifty-nine years old. And lately it felt old. Antique. Christ, what he wouldn’t give for a beer and a chance to get laid by that girl at Tommy’s. She was a bright thing. He’d vote the bastards out of office if any other bastards would do any better. The white house down below had rung the cops once about his chain-sawing on Sunday. Fuck the neighbors and their Sunday. Fuck the neighbors and their lament about the old elm. Fuck everyone. What was it his son had said in that poem. “Fuck was a strong word, an Anglo Saxon word, a good word that gets the job done.” He was sharp, that boy of his, despite his politics. Funny how the kid could be so sharp and dumb all at once. How anyone could believe in those sissy liberal assholes, but worse, he began to think, how could anyone believe anything at all? Maybe all he needed was to introduce his son to Sheila down there at Tommy’s. Maybe that was all anyone ever really needed. It was worth a try. One more cut and he’d have the hour in and enough firewood for a month. It felt good. But, Jesus, those little kids. That was what bugged him. Little kids, parts of their bodies just strewn across the ground like windblown trash. And our boys did this? Something was fucked—big time.

II. The Innocent

The iron gate opens into a field of snowmen lively with sticks and carrots and their button-eyes of coal. No one asks who put them there, so eager are we to mingle, to get acquainted. A crow older than the far mountains calls to us in his misery. It was not his choice to stay behind here where color holds for him no advantage. The sun has been told to stay away by this army of cold warriors whose stolidity brooks no compromise. It obeys according to the terms of a treaty made when the old was new and far away. We walk further into this stage set for a December pageant of badly dressed and skinny children, orphans and waifs from Basra and Tirkut, Tamil Nadu, Aceh, Kobane, Bethlehem, children whose lives are to be cut short—of this we are reminded in this white garden beyond the black gate. Perhaps it is the cold. Adam lived in other forests besides Eden. Somewhere beyond the Tigris it is snowing even now. And on a beach somewhere in Turkey that little boy—

WE ARE MEANT FOR GREATER THINGS by Jen Julian

Jen JulianWE ARE MEANT FOR GREATER THINGS This girl, she’s one of those people you hear about nowadays, living her life for the second time around. She’s a slack-faced, dream-eyed sister, born—twice now—at the end of a gravel road outside…

KENNETT SQUARE by Erin Jones

KENNETT SQUARE
by Erin Jones

We had forgotten the dank
mushroom farms,
the deer
carcasses
peppered across route
1
for a full mile. This one’s fur
is patching the highway
like fresh moss, its rib cage
steams
in the median.
This is different than
the hardboiled
bodies of armadillos.
Those
yolks made us queasy,
but this one
is intimate.
In the distance
we can hear
the birds stir
for carrion.
In the distance we
can hear
the other meat, its
fearful hoof clicks,
the blood
still beating.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF SLED by Douglas J. Ogurek

A DIFFERENT KIND OF SLED
by Douglas J. Ogurek

“Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.” – John 4:29

I got no rabbits’ feet on today. But the sledders don’t know. Cuz I got my jacket on. There’s the whistle, and there goes Kinkly. Kinly and the other racers. Right down the hill, right? Thoom. Kinkly’s the fastest. Those rabbits’ feet? They might be real. And Kinkly and the other Rabbits got them on. I got seventeen at home, but they might be real.

I’m all kinds of wrong. Like Bucket, right?

The Rabbits got rabbits’ feet. All these different colors. Yesterday Gushy turned around and said they’re real. But I don’t know how they got those colors. Gushy says they use dye. Gushy’s only got one thumb.

There’s red stuff in the snow. It says, “Gushy is fog.” That’s just silly.

Red’s one of the colors I got. My rabbits’ feet, right? So’s yellow, and orange. I got six reds, but they’re not on now.

Gushy’s standing on the bench up here. He’s holding his sled. Way over his head. That sled says something. Big letters: “HOO.org.” I ask him.

“It’s Help Our Oceans.” He points down at the road. “I want the people in cars to see.”

He’s missing a thumb, and he’s got a silver jacket on, and a silver hat. Shiny.

ACTION AT A DISTANCE by Chua Yini

ACTION AT A DISTANCE
by Chua Yini

He spots her from afar because of the turquoise dress that contrasts with her tanned skin. She is walking along the colonial streets of Phuket town, her sandaled feet treading on tiles embossed with traditional Chinese designs. As a matter of fact, so is he, but at that moment he forgets where he is. He is overcome by a peculiar floating sensation and forgets that his feet are grounded safely on earth.

Newton postulated the theory of forces to explain gravity, and Leibniz criticized it as action at a distance—a mere miracle, utter nonsense. The distance between a falling object and the center of gravity is of small importance: the falling speed is the same. She is about sixty meters away from him, approaching closer every second, and he is falling swiftly.

He reads philosophy and his mind is jumbled with ideas—he gets a notion that gravity is love itself, a force enacted at a distance without physical contact between two objects. Why did Leibniz make it sound like a bad idea, he couldn’t for his life remember when she lifts her eyes and looks at him. Eye contact and gravity, both compelling forces that draw one object to a throbbing epicenter of a great lovin’ tsunami.

THE VERY DIVERTING HISTORY OF MAYA by Grace Singh Smith

THE VERY DIVERTING HISTORY OF MAYA
by Grace Singh Smith

Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.—Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali.

It was Fate, Maya thought. Fate who got her married to someone she did not quite love, but maybe, she would learn to love. In the beginning, she woke up feeling as though he was her baby, this engineer husband her parents had carefully selected. She remembers the ad they placed in the city's best newspaper, The Shillong Times. The classified had described her as "wheatish in complexion" and "respectful of traditional values.” These, and other important details like: caste (Kayastha); languages spoken (Bengali, Hindi and English); height, weight, body type (average); and the occupations of her parents. Her father was "ex-Army" and her mother was "homemaker." And she was also a Capricorn.

According to the pundit, Fate aligned her with the perfect match—Rajeev Majumdar—and the events that followed became in her memory like the pages of a book turned fast. All the rituals flowed into one another until she could no longer distinguish what had happened when. Did she fast all day after she ate doi first? Did she get smeared in turmeric paste next, eating bits of rasgullas and kaju barfis from many unknown hands that thrust themselves into her face, one quickly taking the place of another? So many rituals, so many people, so many days, so many people, so many rituals, so many days…

SALLUIT by Sarah Marshall

SALLUIT
by Sarah Marshall

The snow tongue has no country, and no voice.
It only knows the tread of boots and barefeet
and the dirt-tough paws of animals
and the urging on of wind.

She sleeps, and in the night wakes
to dreams of nails tearing at her throat—
wolves’, their slashings as keen
as their lightless voices—
and finds she has torn her nightgown apart

as those stolen too soon from the lightful world
once did
(or so she has been reading tonight
her books’ gentle faces still open
beneath her hands).

This riding is full
of that kind of story—
the men who scraped lichen from the sides of rocks
admiring the miserly veins of their colorless reaching, the efficiency
or their bare and unbroken life

and the men who looked out at the slope and glisten of an ice heave
and could see only the curve of a woman’s neck

and the men who found themselves eyeing she-bears—the stock
in their hands already fingered
tallow-smooth
as they searched for the glistening
bunch-petals, pinkening
under tobacco-yellow fur.

STONE FOOD by Alex Vidiani

STONE FOOD
by Alex Vidiani

My food was stones from
a stone tree spoon-fed to me

stones in my mouth slurring
my speech so I couldn’t say

love you couldn’t say daddy
only stones I wonder

if my father was also fed stones
during a snowstorm in February

I wonder what he thought
as he smoked stone cigarettes

before seeing me for the first time
the only time I wonder how I felt

newborn in my father’s stone
hands marble-carved from winter

A LITTLE HANDSY by Susannah Betts

A LITTLE HANDSY
by Susannah Betts

whisper: you’re my Jurassic juice
when you suck my
neck and that will be the word
and the word will be With God
and on the third date
we will with hesitant hands

like just-pubescent lesbians, hands
stained of bleeding polish, juiceboxes
sucked dry, save the date,
my invitation, my
God,
the words
birthday party, the words
hope you’ll come, translated through hand
in hair, eyes to God’s
kingdom and heaven-sent nectar
all mine.
On the third date
presunrise and pre-carbon-dated
light fall and swell the word
(hopeful you meant it) my
sense dulled by improper forging, lubrication
dripping through cracks in the warriors’ hall, fists
clenching drinks, where toasts to Valhalla and prayers to God
Above and God Below and Gods
as versatile as army knives woo + crush + date
+ shag + marry + I’d like a glass of juice
while we’re keeping our words

AUTHENTIC TWAIN by Adam Shafer

AUTHENTIC TWAIN
by Adam Shafer

She handed me a gift. It had heft and permanence and was wrapped tight in a way I could never recreate and so I opened it with proper reverence. It was a second edition of Huck Finn, but I already owned a first edition. And she knew that. I had only brought it out at every party we threw for the first three years of our marriage. She’d promised me the gift of a lifetime and I’d gotten my hopes up. Again. She told me to open it, still beaming, still excited, still blind to my disappointment. There, scrawled on the flyleaf in blotchy ink, was Twain’s signature. I looked at her in shock. It was extraordinary. She was extraordinary. Well past midnight, after she’d fallen asleep, I compared the autograph to authentic images I found online. I hated to do it, but I had to be sure.

WHY DRAW TREES by Laurel Hooker

WHY DRAW TREES?
by Laurel Hooker

Before I went to art school, before I decided to become a painter, before my work and classes carried me far away into the world of fine art, all I really wanted to do was draw. I drew the way a lot of teenagers do–carefully, self-consciously, and often. I drew unaware of the complicated realm of critical analysis, ego, sophisticated processes, and expensive materials that would soon emerge in the form of my higher education.

When I was a student at the Tyler School of Art, drawing nice pictures was the farthest thing from my mind. In that four-year whirlwind of studio classes, I roved quite far from simple drawing. I took glassblowing, ceramics, on-loom weaving, and clay-figure modeling. As a painting major, I took drawing classes, but they were secondary to my painting classes. After graduation, I went home to my parents’ house in east Tennessee. where I listened to the drone of the cicadas in the evenings and slept until noon. For the first time in four years, my life slowed to a walking pace. I made a couple of paintings; I carried a small watercolor kit with me as a way of keeping in habit. I was doing something I hadn’t done in a long time: I was looking. Namely, looking at things that I didn’t get to look at during the years I was living in North Philadelphia: Trees. Grass. Flowers. Mountains. Rivers. The ground at my feet, even.

Had I ever really looked at the ground? Had I tried to separate pebble from milkweed with only my eyes? Or greeted the challenge of a matrix of blades and buds, clustered and sprouting, snaking in ribbons, spurting from muscular stalks? What about the trees? Had I ever tried to see every leaf? Had I tried to follow the entire narrative curl of a single branch into its stems?

THE BUSINESS OF BODIES by Gwendolyn Edward

THE BUSINESS OF BODIES
by Gwendolyn Edward

Late on the fourth of July my friends arrived home to find their house on fire, everything blackened and damp from firehoses, their two dogs and cat lost amid the scorched remnants of their home. Early the next day a mutual friend called me. We don’t know what to do, Anna told me over the phone, about the bodies.

She’d called me specifically because I’d worked in the veterinary industry for years. Everyone had heard the story about the time I had to decapitate a cat we feared might have rabies. She assumed, I think, that I’d be one who might know what to do. But I didn’t know what to do; I’d never dealt with a situation like this either. When I called the emergency vet I was told they would charge at least two-hundred dollars an animal for disposal: an impossible immediate expenditure for our community of still-struggling ex-college students.

I’ll go get them, I told her, and keep them until tomorrow, a Monday when the regular clinics would be open again and we could dispose of the bodies at a more reasonable price. No one else, wants to, you know… Anna said. What she meant was no one wanted to look at broken and burned bodies of the pets we knew. No one wanted to house those bodies either, dead pets in the garage. I asked if we knew anyone with a deep freezer. No one wanted to share their space for food with corpses either.

Years ago when I had to decapitate the cat I learned a bruising lesson about practicality and death. We needed to send the head to the veterinary school at Texas A&M for rabies testing; it seemed awfully inhumane to cut an animal’s head off, to wrap it in plastic and put it in a cooler, but that’s the way things are done.

The clinic I was working in was new and didn’t have all the equipment we needed. A scalpel, no matter how sharp, will most likely only cut through skin and muscle, not bone. I was sent to the grocery store for gloves, heavy yellow ones used for washing dishes, and I also bought a large cleaver. In the clinic, we hacked at the spinal column, and when the head finally came loose, I thought its neck looked like a Christmas ham, and afterwards was so sick with the imagery that I dry-heaved in the bathroom while the other employees packed the head for shipping. We wrapped its body in paper towels and plastic Kroger bags and put it in the top section of our refrigerator next to microwave meals; we didn’t have the money to buy a deep freezer either.

5 a.m. by Carla Drysdale

5 a.m.
by Carla Drysdale

Inside the dream you wander shoeless
in supermarket aisles. Loneliness

opens its stone lid, invites you in. Even as they fly
birds trust in landings. In the right

tilt of rays you can become the silver thread
pinned to the eave,

the spider’s wide swoop over
hayloft in honeyed light. Things

spiral inward and outward
at the same time — lines

drawn on your fingertips
before you were born

— the scrawl of maps survivors carry.

STORM by Paul Crenshaw

STORM
by Paul Crenshaw

My daughters had wandered too far ahead when the storm came up suddenly in the mountains so I ran through the rain to find them. Thunder rattled off the sides of the saddles and rolled down through the draws like the announcement of some end. The girls were tiny things then, no more than 5 and 8, and each sharp crack sounded loud as the last hour of the earth. I ran past clefts not deep enough to be called caves where crowds huddled out of the rain, and I must have looked wild as the wind still in the tops of the trees as I came out of the curtain and stood scanning the small knots safe beneath the dripping rock, then disappeared again into the downpour. The mountain stream had grown fierce as the uncertain future and wide as the world our children walk around in. The air stood stacked with ozone and if there is a greater fear for a father than the loss of a child it can only be the loss of two, so I kept going along the mud-slick trail, up the wet stones carved into steps, crossing the seething stream on footbridges no larger than Legos, higher and higher into the hills until finally finding them standing in the storm beneath an overhang where water fell on their heads clear as comfort. They stretched out their arms, mouths wide as mountains, their laughter loud even over the deluge.

WORKS ON LOVE by Michelle Doll

WORKS ON LOVE
by Michelle Doll

My work is about felt moments, both the visible ones as well as the ones that we aren't able to see. I spent many years creating work about feelings of disconnect and loss. When I'd leave the studio, those feelings and the difficult emotions surrounding them became amplified. As a result, today both my life and my work is focused on love and connection, what I see as the root of intimacy.

Such moments exist as I go through my day. I find I am constantly searching for evidence of connections between people. Living and working in New York serves as a constant source of inspiration as I can absorb intimate interactions on the streets. I’m attracted to the physical and metaphysical energy that exists between individuals who share intimacy, the touch between a couple, the closeness between a mother and child. By scrutinizing and studying these innermost human feelings, my paintings attempt to evoke these same intimate connections of the mind, body, and soul only now through the physical substance of paint.

Ten Years in Belgrade by Sara Alaica

TEN YEARS IN BELGRADE
by Sara Alaica

It had been ten years since I’d been to Belgrade and the first things I noticed were the billboards. The blasted-out skeletons of iron had been rebuilt, painted, and were skinned in colorful faces smiling down on the grey skyline. They seemed so oddly out of place, as if they had landed straight out from the sky.

I’d spent my childhood in the city, but I’d gone abroad and hadn’t been back since just after the war. The airport hadn’t reopened, so I had flown into Frankfurt, rented a car, then driven 120 mph in the slow lane of the Autobahn through the deep tunnels of the Viennese Alps. The highway linking Belgrade to Zagreb was empty, and the deep impressions of tank treads were still visible on the shoulder.

But now, ten years later, had been shown the ruins of Avala, the tower on the hill overlooking the city where I had gone as a child to see the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was just a wet tangle of cables and rubble all along the slope of the hill, as if someone had pushed it too hard and it had fallen, exhausted, on its side.

But now, ten years later, it had been rebuilt, more beautiful than before, and everywhere that had once been rubble was now so new that I couldn’t recognize the turn-off to my aunt’s house, and I almost missed it.

I was meeting my sestra there, who had agreed to take me through the city and show me what had changed. As we drove back across the Danube she pointed out a hotel down by the water. It was yellow and gold, framed by old oaks in the traditional style of old Europe. Do you know what that is? I looked at the exit that led down to it and marveled at the change. That’s where that old decrepit factory used to be.

TALENT SHOW by Nels Hanson

TALENT SHOW
by Nels Hanson

The boy lowered his orange papier-mâché beak and his feathers cut from newsprint fell over the cutout eyes. He raised both brown wings, acknowledging the scattered, light applause, then hopped off the stage on clawed feet, past a stunned-looking Mrs. Waverly, his fifth-grade teacher, who had emerged onto the boards.

“Peter,” she called, “Peter, come back!” as parents and grandparents began to murmur and Mrs. Waverly stepped toward the bunched curtain. Principal Harvey stood from his front-row seat and hurried up the three stairs to backstage.

Robert Hamilton turned to his wife, Helen, who stared straight ahead at the empty platform, at its proscenium arch hung with white and red holiday bells, flanked on either side by three silver leaping reindeer, who appeared to have slipped their harness to escape Santa’s stinging whip.

“My God,” a woman behind the Hamiltons announced. “What on God’s Green Earth was that?”

“I’m not surprised,” answered a low voice beside her. “It’s what you get, not letting the kids pray at school.”

“You knew about this?” Robert asked Helen.

Her gaze focused on the trail of silver tinsel fallen from the previous actor portraying a skipping spruce, decked with blinking lights and ornaments.

“I only helped with the costume.”

“‘Someone is dreaming me’? ‘He likes it white and still’?”

“He said it was a secret, not even Mrs. Waverly knew. But I think she did – ”

“His teacher put this on? Without our consent?”

Helen shook her head, lowering her voice:

TRICHOTILLOMANIA by Michelle Lin

TRICHOTILLOMANIA
by Michelle Lin

Here is a girl with a mirror. She is separating
her eyelashes with a safety pin. Her mother always said
that 1 out of 10 girls go blind looking at the moon,
and 1 out of 5, pierced by a needle. So, in the end,
how many girls lose their sight? I was never any good
at math. I don't understand how lines are infinite,
how hair inches forever from roots, always growing back,
never ending or starting. I once flipped stones in my yard
to find what lay beneath. Worms and roly pollies,
white in the rare sun. Pearly scales writhing their bodies
into perfect segments—line segments, just as bad as lines.
They make the needle that salutes, barely pricking the skin
of my eyelid, the handle of the mirror casting light
into my gaze. The cabinet shelves in the hallway
where my mother placed wedding photos just

A MIND OF WINTER by Dan Tessitore

A Mind of Winter

You knew before
you drew the shade

(before you shook
the dream of flying),

the silence saying
snow, saying

get up,
draw the shade,

see what you
know to be true.

And there it is,
the color of paper.

*

How many years
has the snow collected

the sun, returned
the sun as silver?

*

In the dream
you are young.

It is Christmas
Eve. You lie

beneath the tree,
gazing up

through lights,
ornaments,

TORNADO by Mark Brazaitis

TORNADO
by Mark Brazaitis

She appears in my dreams as a tornado. The settings vary. A dusty plain. The downtown of a major metropolis. My backyard. Although I never see her face, I know who she is. I feel the wind in my hair. I feel the danger and thrill of her nearness. I feel so close to death I know I am alive. And always when I wake up I am disturbed by how still the air is.

I’ve seen Alice Maravicious—Alice Marvelous is her nickname—do scratch spins, lay-back spins, Biellman spins—the figure-skating equivalent of tornados—at the end of Learn-to-Skate sessions, for which I signed up my daughter, having failed to interest her in bowling and basketball. Alice’s spins are designed to show the young skaters she instructs what they, too, could do one day. During the actual lessons, Alice and her assistants skate between four- and six- and eight-year-olds, preventing them—and sometimes failing to prevent them—from falling. Some of the children fall so often Alice allows them to use walkers like old people would. They shuffle around the ice like miniature residents of a retirement home.

At Learn to Skate, Alice doesn’t wear the sleek, glittering dress she used in competitions. (Photos of her on-ice triumphs, including a fourth-place finish in the U.S. nationals, decorate the lobby of the Sherman Ice Arena.) She wears a Russian overcoat, like Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago. She could be in Red Square in winter. Often I imagine myself meeting her in a world apart from the heavy world I inhabit. She is twenty-five years old and I have more gray in my hair than black. I am old enough to be—I hate to consider the math and hope my calculations are off—her father. But in these worlds I envision, I am ageless.

MORE THAN A PAUSE by Nigar Alam

MORE THAN A PAUSE
by Niger Alam

It was spring in Minnesota, and the winter newborn babies were entering the outdoor world for the first time. There were many in the park behind the senior center that day. Mothers cooed as they bent over each other’s jogging strollers, their cropped yoga pants stretching over the mounds of their well-squatted buttocks.

Christine watch ed from one of the few benches facing the playground. She turned her head away from the taut mothers and inspected the babies instead, the curled up little beings in the strollers. They were shaped like commas, but she knew they were much more than mere pauses.

One was parked facing Christine. The single front wheel of the stroller was pushed against her bench, and the mother, facing the other way, leaned her back on the handle of the stroller and laughed with the group that huddled there. Her hair shone golden and strawberry, waving left to right, as she shook her head at the incredulity of some joke.

The infant was belted, physically restrained, but its mind was scheming, wielding its power from behind glassy blue eyes on an egg-white bed. Its stare was unsettling, but at least this infant was not Christine’s affliction. She was free of binding belts and babies. She smiled, lifted her face to the sky and reached her arms out on either side, palms flat on the bench.

BELLE FLEUR by Marie Manilla

BELLE FLEUR
by Marie Manilla

Belle Fleur was there on opening night thirty years ago. She doubts anyone remembers the skinny girl in the ill-fitting wig—a replacement for one of the hoochie coochie dancers who missed the train in Cincinnati.

“You can do it, Mavie,” her mother had said, already slipping her into the gypsy costume. “You’ve seen their act a thousand times.” Her parents were The Fire-Eating Royales. That night, Mavie adopted the stage name she’d been crafting her whole life, Belle Fleur, and posed with a dozen dancers while Mr. Waller mumbled his speech. Nobody booed, since he owned The Burlesque and paid for the acts that had arrived by train that afternoon. Belle and The Lovely Sisters and The Brothers Grimelda carried trunks two blocks to the theater. Mr. Peels, the chimpanzee wearing a suit, tipped his bowler hat to women and children as he’d been taught. Kids and drunks followed him all the way to the theater where the marquee read: “Suitable for the Entire Family!” The hoochie coochies would have to clean up their act.

Directly across the street was the hotel still under construction, but they likely wouldn’t have taken in the performers anyway. Not the right clientele, they’d been told in town after town. After setting up the stage and unpacking costumes in the basement dressing rooms, the thirty-odd performers settled in the boardinghouse run by Mama T, with a backyard, thankfully, for the dancing pony and jump-roping dogs, but not Mr. Peels, who refused to sleep outdoors.

Opening night, before the theater doors opened, the performers scattered like ants around the rococo-style house, caressing the orange drapes and seats, ogling the gold-rimmed balcony and gas wall sconces. The manager shooed them backstage when carriages arrived with the Waller family and other notables who lived in that stretch of stately homes Belle had walked by earlier with the knife thrower’s kids.

DOMICILE by Franklin K. R. Cline

DOMICILE
by Franklin K. R. Cline

My fellow Americans:
if you listen long enough
to anyone, you’ll hear something worth remembering. It’s

Monday. We are committed
to each other, we
share. We’re all in this together.

Place your faith in me, flakes
of sky streaming white and horizontal. The weather’s
wavy, worth mentioning.

I am energized and snowy
enough to speak for you, I am looking
out of a glass door that sneaks

in toe-biting cold. I haven’t
seen any flakes hit the ground but like a slow wham
snow keeps coming, becoming trustworthy.

Last Friday, before the snow, at his cherished watering hole,
Brandon steered his domicile, his body,
toward my booth; he spoke of piloting

what I think he thinks
of as a container down a road void
of street lights and there were stars, he said, he hadn’t seen

since he was a child. I like to see where I am going, so my thoughts
on that are at best conflicted. The snow’s
hightailing it, a million kamikazes pulsing sideways past

KEYS by Kevin Tosca

KEYS
by Kevin Tosca

The light was green but a woman was standing outside her car in the middle of the slow lane with her emergency blinkers on. She was surrounded by what looked like geese. Geese are everywhere in Minnesota. Geese aren’t interesting. Grace glanced left and saw too many vehicles hurtling towards her. She had to stop. After stopping, she realized what the animals really were, what this woman was doing with them.

Wild flapping of arms, shooing and yelling and exhorting, she was trying to get three wild turkeys to cross the road.

If this were a silent movie (and, stuck inside her car, it was), Grace would’ve said the woman communicated a fallen, flawed brand of earnestness, that her desperation was the trumped-up, righteous desperation of the undesperate. She looked like an enraged and foolish general.

Forced to wait, Grace focused on the birds. Having not seen wild turkeys since the winter she spent house-sitting for her uncle, Grace thought about her Maine winter and how she didn’t find the silence, solitude, or peace she thought she would have. Did they exist? She didn’t know, but she could still remember that flock and the magic when it appeared: fifteen big, plump, proud, beautiful birds that had tromped through snow and wood in search of the cracked corn Grace’s uncle had told her not to forget to scatter.

Grace watched them through a picture window. Some, after feeding, flew into the branches of the king pines where they perched like bleak-plumaged buddhas before moving on to wherever they moved on to. They were unspoiled, marvelous, natural. And they made Grace feel old, the wild turkeys did, though she was only twenty-seven at the time. More precisely, looking at beings that made the words “rare,” “endangered,” and “extinct” pop into her head, they made her feel that her youth was over, or that it should’ve been.

AND BLOOD ON THE TRACKS IN THE TAPE PLAYER by Roy Bentley

AND BLOOD ON THE TRACKS IN THE TAPE PLAYER
by Roy Bentley

Recall any moonlit part of an hour by a road’s edge:
the snow on the limbs of scrub pine, the silent falling
through night air beside miles of two-lane blacktop.

There is no equivalent to wanting someone that much.
If you think about it, the cop who stood in deep snow
to tap at the window was anything but rude, though

he did flashlight you. Turns out, it takes a uniform
to bring Original Sin into a space scented with sex.
And he did turn away as you wriggled into clothes.

In those days, the mat of beer cans was nothing.
And you got a warning and felt lucky to be young
in Ohio where the police knew your name, hers,

and followed in a cruiser to where you dropped her,
your Firebird or Ford Torino idling for a long kiss
in the driveway of a house with the porchlight on.

TO THE HAUGHTY VISUALIST by Teniola Tonade

TO THE HAUGHTY VISUALIST
by Teniola Tonade

Think terrorism, my appetizer word,
and watch the slide-show of interminable woes.
For balanced main course, I’d serve you poor
then sad, and oh—there’s got to be
a drink—think blood. Your plate is full
of images you love? Still, my steward’s training
says I must serve dessert. So, think Africa; and
I say: dream America. I guess I’ll pack my plates
away, and leave you, as all men must be,
alone to your purging now.

THE INSIGNIFICANT REMAINS by Robert Henway

THE INSIGNIFICANT REMAINS
by Robert Henway

I don’t know why I remember walking down the stairwell that day. It was a practical staircase and extremely boring, not the type that stays in your mind years after. Gray walls, with only the slight confetti of shredded posters to add any color, covered with words imploring us to check out various clubs or work opportunities. Some sign stubs were completely gone, leaving the remaining paper looking like a spent shotgun shell; others had hardly been touched, looking like a primed firework that was later discovered to be a dud. The students in their white and blue Polos, with matching khaki pants or plaid skirts, having only backpacks to supply a sense of individuality, came and went as they always did. That afternoon however, there was an obstacle in our path, a roadblock. This annoyed me greatly because I only had two minutes to get to my next class. Who was this outsider who did not realize the system? Who was this nonconformist who did not follow the protocol? It wasn’t until I was very close that I could see through the huddled bodies that it was a freshman on his hands and knees. He was dressed like us, but he wasn’t walking like us. I craned my neck to see his problem, what was causing him to inconvenience us so. Everywhere brilliantly bright green and yellow highlighters, vigilant red pens accompanied by the dull black and blue scribes of our time scattered and cascaded down the hard cold steps. A single glue stick bounded down, bouncing on each judgmental step. It was presumably not found again. All the while a set of pale frantic hands reached out, desperate to grab the remains. I wondered if his frenzy was because he needed the supplies to finish an assignment, or perhaps he was desperate not to lose any because his mother had bought them for him and they allayed his homesickness throughout the day. Most likely he just wanted to get out of everyone’s way as fast as he possibly could. The reason it was taking him so long was because coming out from the blue and white crowd were red Air Jordan’s, white and black Adidas, brown Sperry’s, and even soft gray Uggs, all kicking out, attempting to knock the supplies around. Unlike my predecessors, I did not give his supplies a kick with a grunt and a laugh, but I didn’t help him either. I continued on, slithering around the gray walls like a cold product on the descending factory belt, in this conformist institution we called school. We did not help people back then, for if we did, we would become them (God forbid).

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