BlazeVOX22 Spring22

anonlinejournalofvoice
Spring 2022
an online journal of voice
22
Spring 2022
BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
BlazeVOX 22 | an online journal of voice
22
Copyright © 2022
Published by BlazeVOX [books]
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the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
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Editor@blazevox.org
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Table of Contents
Poetry
Andrew Cyril Macdonald Anna Kapungu

Bart Sonck Brenda Mox
Brian Terrell Candice Kelsey
Charles Borkhuis Clive Gresswell
Daisy Bassen Darrell Dela Cruz
Elizabeth Alexander Eugene Stevenson
Gale Acuff Glenn Ingersoll
J. D. Nelson Jack e Lorts
Jack Skelley Jeffrey Letterly
Joan E. Bauer Joe Gianotti
Jon Riccio Joshua Martin
Julia Nunnally Duncan Mark DeCarteret
Mark DuCharme Mark Fleckenstein
Mark Harbinger Michael O. Starr
Michael Reich Nathan Anderson
Nelson Gary Ophir J. Bitton
Partha Sarkar Paul Tanner
Peter Mladinic Ric Carfagna
Roger Craik Roger Singer
Ryki Zuckerman Sultana Raza
Lynn Ciesielski Bharti Bansal
Fiction & Prose Text Art & Vispo
Year 2000 Problem — John Tavares Bruno Neiva — 3 Nods to Robert Grenier, 2021
The Elements of Fiction — Ethan Goffman David Felix — 3 Visual Poems
Ruination — J.L. Moultrie hiromi suzuki — Xerox Fancy Car
Present Now — Lohren Green Mark Young — 6 Visual Poems
The Apocryphal Deaths — Marc Lerner Nicholas Alexander Hayes — Servants in Protection
Miracle at St. Ann Four Screen — William Pruitt Pamela Miller — 5 Visual Poems
Children's Clinic — Zary Fekete
Dark Mind — L. Sydney Abel
Through the Glass — Pete Prokesch
Detours — Jacob McShane
Creative NonFiction
Girls! Girls! Girls! — Shelley Stoehr
Poetry Extra Extra

Bumblebees : A Poetry Chapbook by Deborah Meadows
Micro-poem co-translations of the Korean Buddhist monk Ch’oŭi (1786-1866)

Translated by Ian Haight and T’ae-yong Hŏ.
Acta Biographia — Author Biographies

IntroductionIntroduction
In this issue we seek to avoid answers but rather to
ask questions. With a subtle minimalistic approach,
this issue of BlazeVOX focuses on the idea of ‘public
space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone
can do anything at any given moment: the non-
private space, the non-privately owned space, space
that is economically uninteresting. The works
collected feature coincidental, accidental and
unexpected connections, which make it possible to
revise literary history and, even, better, to
complement it.
Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising
analogies these piece appear as dreamlike images in
which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes
merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time
and memory always play a key role. In a search for
new methods to ‘read the city’, the texts reference
post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or
the post-modern and the left-wing democratic
movement as a form of resistance against the logic
of the capitalist market system. Spring 2022
Many of the works are about contact with
architecture and basic living elements. Energy
(heat, light, water), space and landscape are
examined in less obvious ways and sometimes
develop in absurd ways. By creating situations and
breaking the passivity of the spectator, he tries to
develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but
are based only on subjective associations and
formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make
new personal associations. These pieces
demonstrate how life extends beyond its own
subjective limits and often tells a story about the
effects of global cultural interaction over the latter
half of the twentieth century. It challenges the
binaries we continually reconstruct between Self
and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and
‘civilized’ selves. Enjoy!
Spring 2022
Andrew Cyril Macdonald
Indochine
Water flits before storm. Its crimson-set

numbers skies portals lend
to instants hoped for
of dark clouds permitting

seconds we count them.
In flaunt devotion their folds

our glasses fret,
upstage the moments erupting
when churlish conditions

laugh beneath
surface safe haven affords.
This bends summer hymns protecting

the curls, dream-fuelled and
combative
a stringent sun’s despising

ambitious collectives
strode towards:
lost souls here presenting what

thunder rolls to cower through
veins preferring our
imprints at best.
They ascend the drink’s chore.
A dry-spell hangs now

on fields redemptive
while the god’s throne embellishes

their blighted lines
all over dead-calming.

Mass grave
There is a quell the brain
itself only shell
knows of.
It’s a quiet break notions delve

when thought is prin—
cipal fields rip open
to rummage pain kept rational

while sun leaps and
shares a light
time warps in so that shadow dwindles.

Its sad touch of meet particulars
spares us who carry
nine truths assembled

kinder things meadows
their swans turn out of scandal
if havoc strikes and demeans them

their ritual finds
under beams pricked of twenty bodies

the bank that could not reach us.
Now sunk-in through the fowled preacher

dissuades us our allocations of death
mirrored causes grievance burrows.
Memorial
Outlay spreads farther than heart can see.
Sentiment rarely surveys
to the limit of a thing.
Nomenclature and melodrama set their stage

and the thought that spurs us
impediment performs.
It mothers in the graves the lines

once aimed at our truths foretold
as flow and clinch combine to press

sad motives reach bothers.
Retracing steps, there

are pathways to dreams
preference fosters
of each crevice we comb dark

and nimble their faces
uncollected in those rough distances

windows refract through maze of years
lives hold to in loss of purpose.
Wrong to not feel anguish, what comes next

spurns us the moment we record it,
strong in the pull lies thrill with

if hiding truths deep incorporated.
There tears along each

traits these wrongs we inhabit.
Anna Kapungu
EMPERORS COVE
We dived deep into the ocean

Tumbled and swirled
Swam up the waves
Reached the mountain tops
Birds sang on high like angels
Our senses filled with fragrances
Jasmine and gardenia
Love was Adams Ale
We drunk to our fill
It held us together pleasurable
Delightful sunlight on our faces
We dived into Emperors deep
The sea caves threw a blanket on us
Water embrace us
our love was copiousness
I SILENCED THE NOISE
I become a decorative fabric woven into society

Timeless a period between cause and effect
Weaving in out of the intersecting roads of humanity
I met a thousand faces
Decoloured my past existence
Feasting in banquet of humanity
Oiling the wheels of my substance
I hurt my pride humbled my ego
Entered into alleys of euphemisms
Passed out the olives blended with my humanity
LETTERS FROM HOME
In the deserted days

Where the sun is my champion
And the blood thirsts for water
I tell the rays what I miss the most
Catch my breath
Sweat drip down my back
My hands cracked from the labour
Labour without gains
Split the grounds to pass the hours
Read the roads of my palms
Roads that lead me back home
Then I receive your letters
Your words are rain in the summertime
Soothe my blackened heart
Grant elevation to my spirits
My people,the force of humanity
I cannot pray to surrender my heaviness
I cannot cry to release my sentence
WHITE FLAG
I finally washed my hands off love

I explained being lonely as a place I was
Gods gift was taking the long way round
I keep counting the clouds in the sky
Convince myself the sun will shine
When loves tenderness is justified
I lived in Antarcticas cold for a while
Haunted by the fear of the love of a man
The fear that haunted me for years
Blasphemy I did not abide by the laws of love
Love was a stranger
I needed
Needed a link,a bond at an intersection
Bring down my walls of Jericho
Part my Red sea
Then love would be at hand
Encounter it as the winds through my window
It has its own texture endemic scintilla
By the fireplace its mood is unwavering
Wraps in me in its inclination
Justify the hurt in the child
Holds me close till the panic is elapsed
GRATITUDE
Gone are the days when we lived for free

No bills to pay ,internet, electricity and mobile phone
Days were full of sunlight, joie de vivre
No CCTV on every corner
To monitor my movements
Police check for to me obtain employment
Mind your hand it my just touch the stranger
Mind your hand it may get the police called to your home
Humanity respected humanity
We were a central stem tied together
A framework stretching into our raceme
Blossoming flourishing we were soft earth
Flowing water sinuous well formed easy
Incense to the earth mother
We were substance to mortality
Our skin was without the invisible collar
The collar of our skin colour
We were neighbours
Sheltered each other as kith and kin
The days were gratis unpaid for
Granted my feet rest
Watch the seasons without a stir
We had texture to our humanity
Gratitude in our peace in armistice
Bart Sonck
Pyramid of just Being
As if we all are like thunder,

falling from out the clouds,
to hit quickly the ground,
and fade away in a roaring noise,
leaving creatures behind who look
to each other with asking eyes: ‘What just happened?’
Like thunder we all walk around

and live our lives,
it seems I didn’t hold father’s hand
strong enough,
cause by awakening he’s already gone,
and I have to tell so much and other things
It seems I have to wait,

until I’ll see him again
in another world,
maybe when I open the door
to look behind
Every time thunder hits the ground

I hear father say: ‘Please, stay’
Every time thunder makes a roaring sound
I hear father say: ‘I’m not far away’
“no” is the modern “yes”
not a clue what you do,

not a key to open,
not a word to say,
not a ring to throw,

not a future to waste,
not a mouth to avoid,
not a coin to swallow,

not a reason to stay,
not an enemy to forgive,
not a bread to borrow,

not a tomorrow to erase,
not a “sorry” too late
Be with you instead of
be you
I’d rather be with you than being you,

I see a trace of tears on your cheek,
from your eyes towards to your mouth
You know I usually fall slowly into sleep,

talking about the street wars outside,
sighing about the speed wherewith the snow falls,
or just blinking with the eyes to the wall,
but now and then I look to your face,

and eyebrows, chin or even the ears,
whispering to myself: ‘Why do you cry
yourself into sleep?’
to Grasp to invisible things
She awakes suddenly with the question:

‘What lays beneath the pyramids?’
And pulls the sheets to her side,
while my legs become numb by feeling the cold
and I look really honestly old
She sits right up with her back against the wall,

‘Is this world not tuning around anymore?’
And throws away the pillow,
while on my arms grow thorns as if they are roses
and I smile really greatly mean
She falls asleep with both ears closed:

‘Should we better never awake again?’
And covers her face with the sheets,
while my body is suddenly not mine anymore
and I shiver really undead instead
So in the morning I look to her

as a man who loves his own wife,
so in the morning birds sing their own song,
‘No, really: how long is this thing going on?’
Life is not an opera, and certainly not
“Romeo and Juliette”
‘I’m sorry’ is all I can say cause there’s nothing else

I may say, you can turn back the clock but you can
not turn back the time,
I met her in a pub, and although I only drank
soda I drowned in her eyes and get lost in her mouth
I thought I would never betray you,

I always thought that was something only
a neighbour could do,
but in my neighbour’s eyes I’m the neighbour,
so he thinks the same what I think about him
If we open our hands, do we see a

future laying in the palm of our hands?
Is it still significant to strip of the sharp

thorns of a rose?
Are you still the same girl who runs through the
field in her wedding dress?
Big questions receive mostly little answers,

cause she stares to the calendar and sees it’s
no longer Monday but yet already November
She closes very angry the fridge after throwing away

the sheets from the bed,
I look only clumsy and desperate to myself:
‘Evolution = from ape to a jerk’
Bharti Bansal
Everything is easier when you're home
The fall of a dwindling world doesn't bother much perhaps when one is lying on his bed, hiding under favourite
quilt
Or maybe it does?
I know I am home when I recognize the gentle tap of my mother's feet, bringing me a bowl of mangoes
Or how my father always switches off the light every time I fall asleep
Perhaps when one talks about home, he means being seen?

Like the last time when you were diagnosed with depression
Your mother cried for days, or your father denied to look at you without feeling guilt for having raised a child
who didn't know that survival sometimes meant wanting to die
On most days it was more of a sign than symptom
But sometimes it was a mere escape plan from a body that couldn't stop itself from shrinking slowly

The taste of pudina chutney or the flavoured scent of home baked apple pie
Or the old songs that mother hums while cooking
The old radio sitting as still as time
Or the first television that your father bought
Everything has the same story
Of being held and being forgotten
The pale cracked walls are witness to this
Of survival and saving each other
Isn't home more about pulling each other from shallow water?
The days when you cried yourself to sleep
Or how you witnessed your father's slow decline
Because you couldn't get out of bed or comb your hair for days
How you kept checking if your father was breathing when asleep
For you knew if anything happened, the blood would be on your hands
Is home a place where we gradually drown?

The echoes of your father's stifled laughter on watching Punjabi movies
Or the smile on your mother's face as she discovers how hope is usually the person sitting next to you, smiling
I wonder if hope is a little crackle of fire, if hope consumes everything once we believe it is there
The last days of your grandfather mumbling his son's name
Or the last phone call telling he had passed
Home is seeing your father carrying the weight of his father's death, without tears
Home is waking up after crashing into a truck because he couldn't see the shrinking distance with his lost,
grieving eyes.
As much as it is the first greeting while being held by your father for the first time
It is often the last goodbye too

Waking up to the first sunrise because you promised your mother to go on morning walks, get better or not
think about dying when seeing a speeding car
Home is your father waking up with you with a smile on his face because he believes things will get better when
you decide to take charge of your life
It is a mother's prayer despite knowing that God, perhaps is a Schrodinger' cat, it can exist as long as one
decides to look for it
Perhaps God is mostly a cat scared of being forgotten for it is the greatest misery, remembrance perhaps is a
love language too,
Maa loves God, Maa loves me
Sometimes I am what she looks in a portrait of God, sometimes she wishes she could forget the love she has for
me, debilitating love, maddening love, love without boundaries, love despite boundaries
Home is abandoning the morning walks because you no longer can drag your feet as you wobble under the
weight of your life

The last sunrise you will witness through its windows
The last glass of water you will demand
The last time moving your eyes around
Seeing your photograph hung on the wall besides your parents'
The last time wishing if you could have treated them better
The last regret
Home is hearing that your children forgive you
Home is knowing that sometimes forgiveness is only a closure, not atonement
Home is accepting it regardless
The last song you sing as people you have loved, wronged surround you with tear in their eyes,
Home is uttering the first words as your eyes slowly droop,
Home is exhaling the last breath that you carry along as a sigh,
The last time remembering what it looked like, to be recklessly alive, to be so carefree it hovered around the
borders of selfishness, to be so selfless, it sometimes meant submission
Holding on
Letting go
But mostly holding on while letting go
Bella Hadid and I have nothing in common
Google still hasn't answered my question

About who is the most beautiful girl in the world
Perhaps there are too many answers
And not a single algorithm to filter out one
I keep scrolling through the suggestions until I reach a page that says," Bella Hadid has the most perfect face
according to science"
I look at the analysis that says something about golden ratio and Fibonacci series
Immediately I take my mother's pocket mirror
And start counting how many fingers cover my forehead
Four, it appears
It talks about the distance between the eyes
And I realize my myopic eyes are too arrogant to admit they are lonely
Like lovers who know about their dying love but choose not to leave each other
My spectacle is a shade of red and black
Something to add color to my face
And my lips are big enough to be almost beautiful
I compare my nose with Bella's petite nose
And measure it between the thumb and index finger
Too wide, it occurs
I rush to my sister and ask her to do the same
(Insecurities are contagious that way)
And we compare the width of our nose
My eyebrows aren't the perfect shade of black, too patchy, says the girl in the parlor
I have the most ordinary eye color
(Turns out none of my ancestors were different)
But when I stand in light, as sunrays, entering through the western window of my room, fall slantly on my
face, I can see the dimmer shade of brown, almost making it grey, giving my eyes a fake tint
Bella's eyes are green I suppose
Her waist too thin, unlike mine
But if I stand with my leg bent slightly
I almost look curvaceous
Is there a good metaphor for a woman's body besides moon for her face or ocean for her eyes?
I keep measuring and scaling my face
Until I see it's already an hour doing the same
The analysis finally reaches its end, stating the mathematics of beauty
I go to the front mirror in my room
Big enough to reflect my entire body
And keep calculating what's missing in my body
Until I try to smile and see a dimple forming in my right cheek
Bella doesn't have a dimple, I say to myself amusingly
(A placebo to compensate the simplicity; or lack of it thereafter)
So, I keep smiling throughout the day
At strangers, my mother, while posing for a quick photograph
Constantly reminding myself how my dimple is perhaps a flaw in scientific theory
How I am different in most ordinary ways
I smile and smile until the day ends
And look at different photographs I have clicked of myself by then.
Google photos then pops up with a notification that says," you might want to check these shots of sunsets"
And I see my smiling face there, blooming, drooping, spreading like last few rays of sun; a beautiful
transcendence of a movement so gradual, yet so timed, it appears almost automatic
Women
I live under the shadows of my birthgivers

Shadow formed by my mother's infinite sacrifices and my father's intolerance for his own emotions
He believes that men should never curl themselves into a tiny speck of a dot, lay on bed and cry on their lover's
chest
Yet every single day I see him negotiating with the beliefs that are not his own
But given to him as souvenirs from his father who fell in love twice, under the same house where his two
beloved lived, as women should, without a voice, and stifled anger boiling like a hot spring in a cold valley.
I dare not challenge my father's silence
For everything which is not a rebellion, is a fight without victory
Maa has told me times and again how women should suppress their discontent as heavy sighs and sleepless
nights
This is not to say my father is a bad man
(I cannot write without feeling the weight of his love, you see guilt sometimes is an apology)
My father has shaped me into a woman who carries her silence with her, and firmly seeks to be heard without
saying a word.
In our home, what's not said lingers in air like ghost of a child dying in a war, who believes God grants his every
wish, so he stands in front of the gun and takes the bullet in the hope of being rewarded for being a good kid
In our world, we don't accept apologies for the mistakes of our parents, but simply forget who we are.
Forgetfulness saves especially when one is drowning, and we are the kids of adults who couldn't row the boats to
the shore, so they told how water's was the only surface that held bodies.
I am writhing with this foreboding sorrow
Asking my mother if time really heals wounds or does one become complacent?
I have seen my grandmother shaping her seven daughters into women who should and must know that men
hide their hearts, either in noisy anger or sullen silence
So they must listen to the words that lie at the tip of their tongues.
My mother has spent years trying to hear what my father didn't have the courage to say
My aunts have walked the same path, standing under the same tree which bears the same fruit they have tasted
over and over again.
And now when I have grown into an adult, I know that love doesn't compensate for the space left behind by the
absent conversations.
Our house is an alias for conformity
I wake up to the same old beats of my heart trying to make sense of this need to be free
From the wounds my parents passed on unknowingly,
I am trying to forgive my mind for forgetting that my body isn't just a space where goodness of character
blooms,
That womanhood doesn't not mean blind acceptance
That even though I have seen women of my life trying and trying,
I should remember how sometimes too much forgiveness isn't love
But a reflex, of generations of women doing the same,
Because they weren't told anything better than this.
I forgive my father for not knowing the difference between hurt and anger, or how love can become a saviour
only if one dares to look beyond the confined windows of truth they were taught by their fathers and
grandfathers.
I forgive myself for believing that sacrifice is the only love language, or strength is just a woman carrying grief
like foetus, nurturing it as it becomes parasitic,
I forgive myself for not knowing that my grandmother didn't deserve all of this hurt, for her patience wasn't
sheer acceptance but scream that I still hear the echoes of.
Yellow
Yellow gaze of the setting sun

Reminds me of the days
When the flowers wouldn't droop at the sight of me
I wonder if happiness is all glammed up
In the little corner of my heart
Waiting for the train to arrive
And take her farther from this lonely world
Glimmering sunflowers
And setting sun
Teal blue sky
And violet eyes
Is it too much to ask for beauty?
I wonder if things when left alone
Come back together like a lost cat to its home
It's still feral
This need to be happy
But tell me a sober way
Where I don't run away
From striking realities
Steel countenance of a monotonous life
I am afraid if I wait long enough
I might fade into nothingness
Empty cans and unread books
Vacant roads leading nowhere
Is it enough if dreams remain distant
Ghost of memories haunting at dusk
And me wondering things if touched become real
Everything sleeps to the lullaby of silent sky
The flowers
The birds
The pages of a half read book
And the girl who wonders about her place in this sinful world
Everything eventually comes to an end
The colourful skies
The lonely birdling
The pigmented dreams
The rebellious blue moon
And me, entranced and sad
Like the little star falling and fulfilling wishes
Brenda Mox
INSCRUTABLE HYPOCRISY
His sternness was a power

beyond beauty
opaque to tenderness,
indissoluble to tears.
A universal manifestation
of discontent.
He could command
his countenance thoroughly
maintaining a marble
immobility of feature,
a supercilious look,
a coolness of manner
and that peculiar eye
which nothing could melt.
His was a cool and collected insanity,

an inscrutable hypocrisy
of self possession.
No aperture to be found
in that marble breast.
His reserve froze over

her contradictions.
Reading well his iron silence,
her frankness congealed.
SEPARATE SHARING
So they danced a separate dance

silently alone together
trapped in a waterfront cage
The bay raged at the windows

whistling shrilly between the bars
of their self entrapment bungalow
blotting out all celestial stars.
Days, weeks, months, years

angry storm clouds gathered
darkly on the eastern horizon
smothering ole Sol’s rising
with lonely separate sharing
of their waterfront cage.
BOTH WINGS BROKEN
From him she owned such fearful pangs

of mental suffering.
Every nerve she had feared him
with an insuperable root aversion.
What a miserable little poltroon

had fear made of her.
Horror shook through her limbs
though she sat like a statue
fixed in its niche.
Her heart beat anxiously

all inward tranquility dimmed.
Impotent as a bird
with both wings broken,
she felt the consecration
of her loneliness
as his shrouded, iron will
contracted round her
again.
Brian Terrell
The Snowflake
I awake and I’m standing at the window pane

Staring out at a cold, December rain
All the grass is brown, the flowers are dead
And all I’m left with are the voices in my head
Voices of the past, of days gone by
Voices that whispered those sweet, delicate lies
Like a bitter, poison pill I swallowed every one
Unkowingly partaking til the damage was done
And now I’m floating, floating out into space
Floating alone with things I can’t bear to face
The burning, the yearning, all of it so unconcerning
Sucked in, caught, stuck, and trapped
The prey in the web so skillfully wrapped
Nowhere to turn, nowhere to run
No one to call, no one to come
A shake of the head, I’m back at the window, I’m awake
And amongst the rain I see one lone snowflake
The Night Was Cold
The night was cold; it had rained some

In his heart he knew what had to be done
He’d been betrayed; she’d been untrue
And now at last her penance was due
He her judge and executioner as well
Her tour guide on her voyage to hell
In the darkness he sat alone

Through the window, the moonlight shone
The rain gone and the night was clear
And in his hear he had no fear
He looked down at his hands, calloused and lined
Hands that had always done their best to provide
He looked around the moonlit den of their once happy home

Wondering again why she’d allowed her heart to roam
Why she’d left it unguarded and uncovered
Why she let the embers of their love become smothered
Their love and this house had long grown cold
And cold and alone makes one feel old
Then suddenly from his thoughts he was turned

As through the window her headlights burned
The sound of gravel crunching, her car coming up the drive
She must die, but him; he felt so alive
He crouched down in the darkness on the old hardwood floor
Her headlights killed; the sound of a closing car door
Jingling the keys; fumbling for the lock

He counted the seconds by the ticking of the clock
She quietly opened the door and moved into the room
Quiet, for he was long asleep she’d assumed
She moved to her left and reached for the light
He was on her in an instant, she screaming for fright
Those worn, work-heavy hands squeezed and squeezed

Her scream became a squeal until she no longer breathed
Yet those hands squeezed ever more and more
As her petite, limp body dropped to the floor
Breathing hard and heavy, finally his hands unclenched
The journey she’d earned having finally commenced
He staggered once, a pain went through his chest
He told himself to stop and sit down and rest
But the job was unfinished, the chore incomplete
As a hand reached out and grabbed one of her small feet
He dragged her effortlessly and emotionless back across the floor
Not once looking at her as he pulled her out the door
He buried her in the backyard beneath a half full moon

Near the oak tree they’d planted many years ago one June
No need to be careful, no reason to fear
No neighbors to see, no neighbors to hear
He stood up straight, no tears in his eyes
A weary executioner, his demons exercised
Lightning Struck
Lightning struck
And shattered by heart
Left me to pick up the pieces
And make a new start
The sun came out

And went behind a cloud
A bird flew down
And laughed at me out loud
Then he flew away

Just like you
Bruno Neiva
3 Nods to Robert Grenier

Candice Kelsey
Reflexology
Two cardinals
perched outside the window are taunting me
like the masseuse

who worked my body and afterward
answered
my question — how
often should I see you?
by responding
with brazen celerity —
every day
as if I too could
plume carmine
beneath the sun’s fingers
Two of My Students Fight over Chimamanda Adichie
And I smile
Because they aren’t
Arguing about a boy
They are selecting a scholar
To study for honors credit in the world
Literature class I offer
A list of non-American, non-European
Authors with a post-colonialist lens incomplete But something
at least
Beyond the brief toe-dip
Into Achebe I bring them
To Soyinka, Kincaid, Narayan, and Jin
As well as Wan-Suh
Through a neatly formatted Google Doc —
Two columns of names

Like two pillars of powerful stone
Reflections from Homi Bhabha’s hybrid
Identity standing face to face
Like my two sophomores
Battling it out for Adichie:
One the victor
The other feeling defeated
Thinking she has settled
For Sindiwe Magona
And for the brilliance she is yet to discover I smile
Back to Joy
I read my pocket Whitman in the bleachers

as the catcher warms up my son.
Behind him, a tier of white skyscrapers
like science lab skeletons
flanked by mad palm trees & the outfield

fence that separates him
from six skateboarders landing tricks.
I watch him, now fourteen,
gaiter-masked & broad-shouldered

inhale & exhale. I like to think
he enjoys this, though I know he hears
the halting scrapes of pivots,
know he sees the barrel jump & rails

of the long & lean skaters – confident as hell
with the glow of doing what they love.
Outstretched arms like the soul of a bird
with sudden explosions of flight

then dip as my son pitches his fast ball
to receive it back into his glove. The love
of forward & reverse, of air & speed
into leather womb & out again,

this reentry after a year of no baseball,
a year of stay-at-home orders,
& County protocols. He will stand
on the mound a different kid

who’s been through a hell of his own:
Quit ball & skate? Quit school & disappear?
Today he stands on the other side
of adolescence, that chain link fence
through which we both can see
who he used to be, maybe still is, or always
will be. The backpacks & Arizona teas,
focused & fast with kick flip freedom,

swivel & wingspan over the wavering
deck & curve of the spine, long & dark
as the hours spent on the five-stair.
Now this park is catching the sunset.

Bone-cold buildings fade like a year,
or a child who has found the way
back to joy. He’s come home finally
from the anger that rolled & roiled

his mind into nights on the back porch
while I slept & he smoked,
inhaling the spirit of disenchantment.
I imagine him trying to exhale

my failure as he skated farther away
from the leathery warmth
of a maternal toss & catch rhythm
that today seems somehow

harmonious at the top of the fifth
with two outs. He balks & turns to the ump,
unphased by his error or by the skaters
slouching by the plate, satisfied

with their footage. I think about that
New York Times article from a few years back
claiming America’s boys are broken
“and it’s killing us.” I close my Whitman

as the ump calls Ballgame!
My son joins his teammates to tip his hat
& shout Thank you, parents!
In Response to My Students Who Still Don’t Understand Irony
and for Germanwings Flight 9525; crew: 6,

passengers: 144, survivors: 0
Take the German schoolgirl

who almost missed her flight home from Spain.
Because of a forgotten passport,
she could have been stuck at El-Prat
to consume an iced mocha alone –
But she made the flight, soon

ascending toward Haltern all buckled
and ear-budded with her freundinnen
and the Spanish ether. Buoyed with relief
she made it forty minutes in
when the sudden descent

sent orange juice, hips, and hands
gripping over Le Vernet.
There was silence from the co-captain
on one side of the cockpit door;
frantic pounding by the captain on the other side

with a fire axe. This fate blazoned
her name misspelled across the news,
over the rocks of Le Vernet,
and into stone plaques like tombstones
or smeared blood over a poet’s doorframe

heart. Lives spilled like orphaned shirts
from torn luggage across the mountainside
that took the German schoolgirl –
who almost missed her flight home from Spain.
Ode to Sadness
a not admitting of the Wound
Until it grew so wide
that all my Life had Entered it
~Emily Dickinson
Unzip this girl from the inside,

and let the rats pour out
tail first and tumbling
to the jagged beat of her heart —
that dust bowl ceiling vent
ruining every room
from L.A. to Augusta —
while she struggles to breathe warmth

hoping for a reprieve
from heavy work
crowded inside herself
a dying dog, angry cat
life she prays through
a sandpaper childhood
burning the eaves of memory
in her hospice soul
like the anthracite coal
her father worshipped
an amulet womb
from Southeastern Pennsylvania
zipped into his shriveling mind,
his quadruple-bypass Frankenstein
heart that cannot stumble
away from the loneliness of being
that four-year-old boy

with no father:
a zipping up of the future,
cold grip like teeth on the wheel
to steer their ‘78 station wagon
forty years later fathering
four times as long as his own
father an immigrant
with so little
time to find the touch

we need the intention
of our people in the only space
we know hunger’s maze
we call our need
to be in the touch
— gifts of the tongue

wet with life and healing —
sights that say we exist
with a birthright
again, it is time
to gather the Depression
into marked cages of this girl’s body this shiny black

bag
of generations
you’ll zip up
until the next time
we perform experiments
paddle-deep in the mine
where she’s a Prometheus canary
dying by noon and waking
at midnight to die again
—a futile warning
wound as old as woe
she ignores as she marches into the earth
just another mine
rat living on scraps with a pickaxe
and a headlamp whistling
the song of her grandfather with the lips
of her father
the carbon tongue of hope
almost a century breath.

Charles Borkhuis
SPECIAL DELIVERY
dressed to the teeth

the poem makes an entrance
on a broken heel and ordinary life
limps in under the footlights
you are invited to a ghostly striptease
nothing up my sleeve
but a long corridor of deep sleep
the dancer kisses the first head

through the tunnel
and a name is pulled out of a hat
this could be me on all fours
a newborn drawn
from an alphabet of tiny bones
or an ancient blood-smeared traveler
crawling across an empty stage
~
forms and faces pass before me
in dancing underwater light
welcome to an egg-white canvas
of squiggles and swirls
the vacuum of space
where matter and anti-matter
annihilate each other over dinner
what billionth particle of matter survives
to create the galaxies and stars
what crumble-mouth talks me into being
now we see though the dancer’s veils

she is unscrewing her body parts
her head is the last to fall
on stage with an open-eyed thud
the sun shrinks to a mole

on her forehead
something is watching us
her lonely head on stage
thinks out loud
there’s too much light in this sentence

I’m blinded by my own thoughts
who can escape the unknown for long
~
they give you a world to stand on
then pull gravity out from under you
and your stomach ends up
in your mouth
words will be the death of us
no wonder I sometimes revert

to speaking in tongues
truth can’t face up to its reflection
it wiggles away through an escape clause
the striptease is never quite over

there’s always another layer of gauze
another leg moving under its wraps
maybe identity is empty at its core
but the sentence strings us along indefinitely
maybe I wasn’t born successfully

the cord between worlds never quite cut
so I linger with the background voices
the rattle of a child’s comings and goings
before the curtain drops
and we are separated from ourselves
as the audience cries encore encore
GRAND ILLUSION
never quite here

you’re forever elsewhere when things happen
welcome back stranger
the world was destroyed and recycled
while you were away musing about how trees
repeat their branching fractals at different scales
patterns hidden under what order of magnification
the flower of a corpse opens to reveal its elegant machinery
and your lids grow heavy between the leaves
you nod off under a ghostly green wave
pluck a small white feather off the underside of your arm
and hold it up to the sun
where have you been

what’s the scale of this hidden dimension
on its way to oblivion
how easily we fall back into place upon waking
and the other worlds inside this one silently disappear
the body sewn up as if nothing had happened
spot check on reality

that illusive labyrinth that comes and goes in waves
the everyday shimmers and echoes
moving toward or away from you
calling through the canals of your inner ear
what was your pensum
the impossible task you were given to repeat endlessly
that set you up to twist and squirm in and out
of your idea of yourself
not so much a question of identity

as the mask behind it
that speaks for you when you’ve grown silent
it dares you to cut your teeth on the void
to break its perfect symmetry and watch
the rippling outline of a body underwater
the impression of a phantom footprint
left after a wave has been sucked out to sea
not to worry
in a perfect vacuum
particles of matter and anti-matter pop into being
and devour each other over a fast-food snack
something keeps bouncing back from nothing
but it’s never the same something
witness these crumpled drafts of a poem on the floor
each more or less real than the last
until one stands in for the rest and says
I will be your virgil for the evening
a guide through your memories

of the living and the dead
that are equally real and equally illusory
unless your thoughts
and the world are irreconcilable
and we are caught in the forceps
that tighten the scream between 0 and 1
either the world is the grand illusion or you are

either something came from nothing
or it was always there on a loop
like the eternal return of a forgotten world
that dies in sleep and is reborn
when we newly awake
perhaps you are the fragment of an argument

buried in dream that must be carefully exhumed
and reinterpreted letter by letter bone by bone
you see now why we cannot let you escape
we may have to smash your particles into smithereens
what is your dark matter made of
what must we do to make your big bang whimper
you can’t elude us forever either you are a particle
acting like a wave or a wave acting like a particle
make up your mind which is it
you can’t be here and somewhere else
alive and dead at the same time
unless we have made a terrible mistake
Clive Gresswell
Essence
from gripping eyes

calculation in shards
demons play on lids and ice
to borrow from the stars
a research into diamond pliability
daggers’ drawn soft glimpse and wheel
throttled in the humid morning a glint
of subtle burn to where the sun explodes
ingesting days and delicate ruptures into night
its dismal black-pitch whine
a rattle of the mirthful collage
deep into the density of the city
and recounting slaughter tales a drum-roll from the blacksmith
time its essence seeps.
Innocence
a filter thru this lens of antipathy

cast upon the soulful enhancement
the beating heart where histories in semaphore
implode and collapse among the perfect stars
the hollow glacier timed to melt in
harmony among those platitudes of grace
those simmering images which so embrace
the gently rocking shelter in tumult time & space
beyond reminiscence of such howling laughter
where the dagger plunges in knives of despair
the rotting flesh corpse charmed in violin times
in violence time shook and shocked this coda ripped to
ribbons in surmising innocence upon a child’s face.
Daisy Bassen
If I became devout, doubtless I’d be driven to acts of heroism
I am thankful
Not to have had a revelation
Of the most profound faith,
A critical redefinition of the world,
Of every road cresting a hill,
Every window cut into a stone wall.
Every time our daughter turns
Her face to me and I know
I love her best.
I am thankful there is nothing

That divides us, that takes you from me
More clearly than an ocean, unskimmed
Even by gulls. If I wake you in the night,
You will understand my fear.
There is nothing to console us, we agree.

We sleep easily, without prayers for the day.
We needn’t judge our prayer for a day,
Addressing ourselves to our animal selves,
Our desire to hold, for a dream we direct,
Whose seams we close without knots.
On burning mirrors
Your mother can keep any secret from you,

As she kept you, before she knew what a secret was.
If you find out, she has decided to let you know;

She has decided to show you her face, knowing
You will not recognize your own. A looking-glass,

Silverback or speculum metal, reflects what is.
You are more. Your mother has always known that.

She’s always known the stillness before your next swallow,
Your next life.

Medium, measured
Miracles have parameters

Like your hinged knees,
Limitation necessary for awe
To retain coherence, your lips
Parted for the traffic of breath,
The sound before voice,
Before a praise-song is drawn
From you, dowsing medulla-deep.
Our eyes are made with lids, superior

Tarsi, the veil we cannot keep
From falling; a gift of small darkness
We need to maintain equanimity
Faced with radiance. Bread, torn open,
And ghosts brook no such barrier.
Darrell Dela Cruz
Targeted Ads
I know many men afraid of showing misalignments:

nothing juxtaposing nothing. Their bodies readjusting
to the lack of attention. What we see encapsulated
on the internet stays just as an image.
Someone selling body positivity pops up. The nude male

models aren’t shown close enough for detailed
facial expressions. They stand amorphous.
I recognize similar features. We all have eyes
wandering toward a lens. Even if we are

still, we want to acknowledge each other
as specimens, etherized, trusting
each other during every examination.
Hooking
He already drank inside the gay bathhouse,

illegal, but who am I to tell him no, stop.
Talking scares the other men off. But he sat there
underneath the glow of two men caressing.

If only my girlfriend would allow me to touch her
he mumbled. He pushed himself back on the formaldehyde
couch, and another man came up to him. Again

pushing back enough for the support.
No, not now, no. He told the other man
he just came. He didn’t look at me

when he started: I didn't want
to be there, but I wanted to be there, you know
man, that feeling, that touch. Shut me up

if I talk to much I told him, and all I wanted
was, and then silence in the moans. The televised
men above us get close, so close. he wrapped my hand

behind me, I didn't want that, but in the moment
it was raw, it is raw. He didn't pick himself up
for a while -- shifting weight,

shifting,
waiting. Are you okay, man? I ask him
Yeah. yeah. Projected still, two men in the middle of love.
David Felix
Composition
Acquerella
Reach
Elizabeth Alexander
COLD WAR
1 Third Birthday (July 23, 1959)
strange little girl
black hair, brown eyes
bright–yellow party dress, white pinafore
looks like a bee
says candles hurt the children
covers ears
won’t sing
she’ll spoil my party
if I let her.
2 Kindergarten
you again
I know, olivia
yes, I am tim
leave me alone.
2.5
that tim thinks he’s so cool
who died and made him God?
3 Invitation
mommy sits me down
“you’re going”
“no”
“I said you’re going”
“why?”
“why not?”
“I hate her”
“don’t be silly
“her daddy is my doctor”
“so?”
“so you are going.”
3.5
who says I wanted to invite him?
4 She Grows on Me
her blue stuffed lion that smells like spit
her nutty games
switch barbie’s head and g.i. joe’s
trade underpants
that she does yo–yo tricks, is scared of angelfish, reads comic books
that she can’t swim as fast as me.
4.5
so glad I’m not a boy

5 Gumball Machine
I get the alien
olivia gets the ring
we trade, dad frowns
makes us trade back.
5.5
I try on junior bras
and cliques
that’s normal (right?) when you are 12
feel like a dork
and don’t know who’ll be gunning for you next.
6 Sixth Grade
she cusses like a boy
throws like a girl
explains how It is done
says she has done It.

7 Her Dad Is a Physician
“so?”
“he’ll set olivia straight”
“meanwhile she’s doing It”
“tim, don’t be silly”
does mom not know I know
(or kind of know)
olivia is lying?
sometimes I think that they both think
I’m dumb.
7.5
not dumb
not brave, not curious—
not trustworthy, either.

8 Bible Camp
they ship olivia off
and she returns like sunday school on steroids
all “jesus this” and “jesus that”
and “of the devil” (most things are)
“for god’s sakes, we’re episcopal!
I can’t ask christ into my heart”
“then when you die, you’re gonna fry”
I liked her better when she smoked and cussed.
9 Cold War
she snubs me on the bus
walks past the place I save at lunch
“what’s wrong?” I ask
“you started it”

“I never—”
“—no, you never said
‘olivia harkness is a social liability’”
liability?
I have to look that up.
9.5
the summer we dissected nutty buddies
(sucked out the ice cream, split the chocolate, tossed the nuts and cone)
those were the days.
10 Ninth Grade
her frizzy braids and pudgy legs
the way she slumps to hide her breasts
that she won’t smile, except at me
that everybody knows we’re friends
I am embarrassed by her.
11 Cotillion
our parents make a weekend of it:
fancy hotel, adjoining suites
color tv, remote control
olivia’s puffy dress
my itchy tux
why the long faces?
smile for the camera!
adults are idiots
we would have killed for this four years ago
I loved her then.
12 High School
crossing paths
in the moth–brown halls

we nod like english lords
imperious and implacable.
13 Code Blue (December 24, 1975)
dr. harkness’s heart
mrs. harkness keens
in mother’s arms.
13.5
the shortest night, a child is born
noël, noël
14 Olivia Embraces Me
but not like that
14.5
we go way back
he can be kind
just now I’ve learned you never know:
we may not meet again.

Ethan Goffman
The Elements of Fiction, Illustrated
Plot
Once upon a time, Protagonist fell passionately in love with Prime Love Interest. They planned a grand
wedding. However, Protagonist felt compelled to sneak off with Secondary Love Interest. Meanwhile,
Antagonist made eyes at Prime Love Interest, who warded him off. Next, Antagonist and Secondary Love
Interest plotted to poison Protagonist. At his deathbed, Prime Love Interest killed herself with a knife, asp,
gun, or by jumping into the ocean—or maybe grief just swallowed her up.
Afterward, Antagonist and Secondary Love Interest got married. They fight every day with poison words, often
wrecking things.
And they lived unhappily ever after, till the day they died!
(but the children carry on)
Theme
Profound Meaning lingered subtly in the air. Profound Meaning could be smelled, tasted, touched, and heard
as a low humming, but never seen. Characters fell in love, laughed, suffered, and died, all transporting Profound
Meaning on an ocean of emotion. Secondary Meaning was introduced, a pale shadow in the distance. Profound
Meaning echoed in the sunrise. Secondary Meaning tip toed cautiously forward. Profound meaning filled the
looming darkness. Secondary Meaning lay near death, abandoned in a crowded hospital ward (but Obscure
Critic is attempting to revive her.)
Character
Protagonist was beset by a tragic flaw that tore her apart. She wanted this and she wanted that, she felt too
deeply and not deeply enough. Prime Love Interest suffered profoundly and broke the affair off. Or was it all
Prime Love Interest’s fault for being so selfish? Was he born this way or had his parents taught him the wrong
lessons about life? Still, Protagonist’s fatal flaw allowed Antagonist, who was something of a flat character, to
manipulate Protagonist toward her doom. Meanwhile, Secondary Antagonist was so underdeveloped as to be
laughable. Why am I here, she briefly asked, then thoughtlessly created obstacles—was she seeking revenge?
Taking advantage, Antagonist verged on triumph. Protagonist attempted to redeem herself with a final noble
action, but it washed away like wavelets against a stern rockface shore.
Symbolism
Phalluses rained down in three forms: a weapon—perhaps a sword or a pistol—conveying profound glory or
heroism, or was it the folly and horror of violence; a cigar that was much, much more than a just a cigar; and an
aboriginal relic that ended up shattered (or had it been reconstructed?). Meanwhile, Protagonist and Prime
Love interest were lost in a cave—or was it an enormous womb—through which they wandered awaiting
rebirth. Or was it a dark forest? Were they together, or wandering separately? At some point, Spring came,
pregnant with new life—and Protagonist, too, was pregnant with love, and, perhaps, with an actual fetus. But
already, in the distance, winter loomed. It is looming still.
Setting
Powerful streaks of something, perhaps eerie perhaps lovely, suffused the sky, creating atmosphere. Weather
pummeled or caressed Protagonist and Antagonist as they embarked on their adventure. Rolling hills and
meadows stretched to the horizon—or was it a wilderness of mountains and thick trees, or clusters of buildings
blotting out the sun? Whatever it was, it permeated the story.
Irony
Wow, that was unexpected!
Climax
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Ooh, Ooooooh, Auuuugh, oh, oh, oh, Ooooooooohhhhh!
(Will a baby be born from this, a kind of sequel?)
Eugene Stevenson
Pasta For Two at Frankie D’s
Pasta for two at Frankie D’s was

all they agreed upon that Sunday:
puttanesca steaming, spicy, garlicky,
a working girl between appointments.
Choosing the place, only an accident.
Dark wood, heavy carpet, snowfall of

white linen in their booth. Over food
was how they talked best, nowhere to
hide as they passed bitterness & acid
across the table like wine past its time.
She burned with indifference, lips tight

as if macerating grapes, made mistakes
with her uncaring: the lasagna last week,
a simple sauce without unity. She did not
like lasagna, or him, & her lips were loose.
Linguini, chianti & talk as intense as

the meal. Smart enough not to say, You
are going to fail, she swept crumbs from
the tablecloth, pasta for two consumed
with difficulty as il conto loomed large.
Bloody Mary Breakfast
Weird trip
in flashback, the
business trip, knowing the
end before the beginning, but
going.
Just the
carry-on facts,
the remnants of triage
& under-the-breath mutterings
last night.
Morning
flight, six hours to
the coast, calculated,
merciless, only a duffel
required.
Bloody
Mary breakfast,
mute companion, but one
is anyone one wants to be,
this trip.
The storm
tomorrow is
reconsideration,
only too wet, too late to change
the past.
Pinocchio at Taliesin West
A wretched boy, Geppetto thought him,

a rascal, an imp. How like fathers of
human boys, the ones whose noses
do not elongate in the telling of a lie.
There stands his creation: a disgrace,

humiliation personified. Fathers have
a choice: to foster & teach, or to whip
& leave ignorant of what is to come.
Tears fell early, the son failed to please,

while Geppetto’s hands held the strings.
Promises made, some promises broken,
other promises delayed until long after.
With eyes so large, Pinocchio embraced

his need to see around the curve of the
earth, to find all the delight he could hold,
found a tough place of yes & no, up & down.
Wood into flesh, dream into experience:

to walk, legs burned off; to swim, caught in
a net; to laugh, chained in a circus; to flee,
swallowed in the belly of an enormous fish.
Death came to the puppet, to the boy,

too many times, turned into an ass indeed;
once committed to work, to be good & to
study, he delivered & ended hung in a tree.
Under this shining brow, this shining statue

of ridiculous puppet runs to lovely boy in
a run to obedience, honesty, hard work,
in a run from a dream to becoming real.
As did Heloise who came here to study,
to perform, age twenty-three, & stayed
three more lifetimes, true heart, enduring
wish, in an age when that was possible.
Note: Pinocchio, by Heloise Christa (USA), 2000

Roundtrip Ticket, Open Return
Roundtrip
ticket, open
return. Fill in the date
with certainty, relying on
a vow.
The end
is found in the
beginning. Take the flight
to be somewhere. Better than rest,
alone.
Decide
on the drive to
the airport whether to
punish, reward, go & return,
or not.
In the
briefest journey,
a promise of solace
before lifting the ticket, light
as air.
Gale Acuff
Everybody goes to Heaven or Hell
folks say at Sunday School so I say Sure

enough and just go along, I don't mean
to Hell or Heaven but that I agree
though just to avoid an argument, for
ten years old I'm pretty peaceful, I'd make
a fair preacher save that I don't believe
and it might be a law that you have to,
I guess my God is more easygoing,
resting on Sunday and I mean resting,
He or She or whatever's the proper
handle hangs at home while folks spiff up and
meet at church--how can they expect God to
pay attention when He's dreaming? Unless
He rested just that once and it was good.
When they die folks head for Heaven or Hell
they preach and teach, mostly preach it seems, at

Sunday School, I have perfect attendance
there so I must know something, at least I
feel pretty righteous and told my teacher
so but she said Gale, that's commendable
but don't ever think that you're God Almighty
yourself, you know, so I said Oh, no ma'am,
of course, that is I mean I damn sure won't
but the word that escaped kind of nailed her
so she said Well, that's pretty good proof that
you're not He and I was going to beg her
Please don't tell my folks that I curse at church
but then I thought What the Hell, I don't care
too much and if God does then good enough.
Everybody dies but not all at once
and that's a good thing though it's not a thing

at all says my Sunday School teacher and
if everybody died at the same time
nobody would be left to carry on
the future, which makes sense, I'm ten years old
but that makes sense and I don't want to die
at all, I want to live forever and
I can, she says, my Sunday School teacher,
I can live eternally but first I
have to die and I don't want to die but
to live forever I have to die, which
sounds crazy but that's religion and at
Sunday School I have perfect attendance
so that's something. Sometimes I wonder what.
When you die you're still alive, that's called
religion and I get my weekly dose

of it and the Holy Ghost at Sunday
School and I go since one day I'll wake up
dead and have to get ready to meet God
and especially His judgment of me
and then get to stay up yonder with Him
or have to go to Hell forever to
suffer and suffer but maybe after
I can get promoted to Paradise,
I'm not too sure of the facts, but I'd like
to have another shot at life on Earth
before I have to spend Eternity
in the Good Place unless there are Chinese
buffets there and I mean all-you-can-eat.
In the Afterlife you're kind of on your
own is what they say at Sunday School but

then that's life as an angel, unless you
and your angel-buddies are all praising
God Almighty through song and harp and
other ways to make a joyful-noise-un-
to-the-Lord and all that, I'm kind of shy
and expect I'll stay so while I'm dead but
then again if Heaven's perfect so will
I be so if I'm still shy like I am now
while still alive then part of life on Earth,
mine anyway, will be perfect, too, so
why croak at all? I'll take death up with God
when the time (or Eternity) comes
and I'm not busy praising. I'm too nice.
Sooner or later we all go to Hell
whispers Grandfather, it's his deathbed

after all so I guess he can say what
-ever he wants, not even God would blame
him and I guess that's why Jesus died but
before I can advise him he closes
his eyes and I don't want to wake him just
when he can clamp his 'lids forever, that
seems like cheating to me or at least it's
not fair in some way I'm too young to know
and maybe Grandfather was, too, when he
was ten years old and his grandfather be
-fore him, let's see, that would be my great-grand
-father, and on back to the beginning
of it all. I close my eyes and see me.
Glenn Ingersoll
The Scent of My Advice
Even with the windows open, I cannot feel your door.

Something rattles when I shake it, so I shake it.
You don’t have the body. Do you need the head?
I’m sorry but my tummy does not grumble for your meat.
The mass grave – so cozy! I curl up on its grass.
Break the bone and stretch it. Every day a longer leg.
One can gain and gain and remain a lonesome one.

But ever more and ever more the self.
Lift the lazy knife from the shelf.
My opinion is informed by decades of tuning in to frogs.

On the first floor of the hospital garage waits the egg.
Bite harder, but no harder than needed to keep the body up.
Into the Skull
I walked into this head.

Though it was of poor size,
indignant and mild, I walked in with my chin up.
Rooms giving onto rooms —
one so bottled it held air
like a fist, one so wide happiness couldn’t
stretch between mirrors. Carpets humped
and slumped and crawled up to hump again.
From this room’s swaying straps
to the one whose weariness wore out the wires,
from room leaking white to room
dusted with down, I held my peace close
and passed on. I walked. I walked until
I grew tired and walked and walked.
A feather pressed me to the floor.
From the distance came a banging
of flies against a final door.
Every endtable beckoned like a bed.
I listened to the imprecations
of bones against time and its creep.
Words were weighted with the old cotton
and barb of a whistling ache,
something the mouth has been working over
since teeth. What did I need to know,
as a visitor? What could I leave
that I had carried in, squeezed like a promise
to get through the hole?
Later, undressed, in a bed of haze,
I remembered the wet scrabble of the key
digging in the latch.
A Red Wren
He was tender-hearted, exerting

a last decoration on declared love,
which, shortly afterward, colored

in a shock of distorted dealings
and swift collective mind.

He had to go down to the profound
dinnerplate, external to his inner

milestone, a white cube.
He adopted this habit of squeezing

the roads off his own father,
the physical material disturbed,

as during the first years of the picnic.
Who Stands in the Way
Who stands in the way of the returning pilgrim,

hinges groaning in the door of his day?
Who lays clouds over a blue too deep to carry,

its melody scribbled over the red caps of black divers?
Whose history survives in pigeons?

Whose lips shine with the wrong vegetable?
Whose heart did the tugboat bully

past the reef of sacred knives?
Who broke the rearranged tableau

into a school of throats and animal houses?
Who lit the dunes crawling over the barrier

into a country angry with its stars?
Whose bone, exposed to many tongues,

quakes the thirst of held air?
Later Than the Wish
Direct application of the binding,

helpful to securing of silhouette to paper
in exchange handed over for the moment the date
would later give up, later than
the wish to put a stop to what lists inexactly
toward purchase, a log of all
carelessly picked out names,
those inadequately complementing titles,
even where footing
puts at issue a balance,
such contradiction, if any, ranking advice
dispensed freely with the more precise,
authoritative variety, that
backed up by future tracked like harvest
six months off, the line,
or series of rows in railyard parallel,
which from pins swing yellow berries.
hiromi suzuki
Xerox Fancy Car

Poetry by hiromi suzuki
I.
Who knows the parkade is copy machine?
The cars which are spun and spit out of the square box,
whether Peugeot, Mercedes, or Jaguar, are all made of papers.
II.
Rain falls on the town.
The used copy paper, stained with ink, loses its way home.
The wind is blowing.
Inkjet print dances lightly through the valley of the buildings.
III.
A road sweeper runs on the breakdown lane at midnight.
Along with the fallen leaves of the ginkgo,
the Xerox cars disappear below the horizon.
Micro-poem co-translations of the Korean Buddhist monk Ch’oŭi (1786-1866)
Translated by Ian Haight and T’ae-yong Hŏ.
Excerpts from Homage to Green Tea
When sweet green fragrant tea

enters the Court of the King,
brilliance extends in all directions
and every pathway opens.
Your divine roots

grow on the Mountain of True Wisdom—
an Immortal’s jade bones
distinguish you
from all trees.
A sip of Jade Flower
rises like wind—
the body lightens
as if walking high heavens.
The bright moon, a candle, and one’s lone friend—
white clouds
form your surroundings.
To become young again
like a dried tree sprouting anew—
an eighty-year-old
will have a smooth face
like a heavenly red peach!—
one can attain
this miraculous effect.
I have a wellspring
and draw water pure as jade.
I boil the water in a stone kettle,
but sometimes I over-boil it—
how can I then bring this water
to a Seoul-city gentleman?
A T’ang court dinner
served 100 delicious dishes—
we only remember
Chinyuan’s Purple Corolla Tea.
Since then, traditions
for early-picked tea leaves
have grown commonplace—
those who are pure, wise, and prominent
admire such tea’s lingering flavor.
The dead buried in the earth
show gratefulness
for their families offering tea
by blessing them with wealth.
Tea is better
than the six accompaniments
for courtly banquets;
how the first Emperor cured his pains
is a mysterious story.
People once adored Startling Thunder—

Freshly Sprouted Purple
is now favorite.
Ian Haight’s collection of poetry, Celadon, won Unicorn Press’ First Book
Prize. He is the editor of Zen Questions and Answers from Korea, and with
T’ae-yong Hŏ, he is the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems
of Kyun Hŏ and Magnolia and Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim—finalist
for ALTA’s Stryk Prize—all from White Pine Press. Other awards include
Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Translation, and grants from the Daesan
Foundation, the Korea Literary Translation Institute, and the Baroboin
Buddhist Foundation. Poems, essays, interviews, reviews, microfiction and
translations appear in Barrow Street, Writer’s Chronicle, Hyundai
Buddhist News, Full Stop, MoonPark Review and Prairie Schooner. For
more information please visit ianhaight.com.
Ch’oŭi (1786-1866) was a Korean Buddhist monk given a traditional

Confucian education, making him a uniquely trained scholar of his period.
Ch’oŭi is considered one of the first pre-eminent experts on the subject of
green tea in Korea.
T’ae-yong Hŏ has been awarded translation grants from the Daesan

Foundation and Korea Literature Translation Institute. With Ian Haight, he is
the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems of Kyun Hŏ and
Magnolia and Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim. Working from the original
hansi, T’ae-yong’s translations of Korean poetry have appeared in Agni,
New Orleans Review, and Atlanta Review.
J. D. Nelson
that of the old earth
you know it as your home
get ready for alien ships in your breakfast bowl, brother
the shark saws on the earth with a waterpik
when you can’t be the copier

you can be the coffee maker
cup, not yup

a dawny day
chief amongst these is the earthworm

what are you doing about the leaking time on earth today?
world book encyclopedia
on this morning of the thinking machine

the talking hand is ready to begin
and that means another toast and jam

to be startled by thunder is natural
the welcome mark of the traveling king

the sea turtle is the moon
the 4D planet is ready

now I’ll walk into the sun
the water hums in the language of the lake

I am a tree seeking the light
astro wolfie
I have a beaded head like a snake

or someone walking around like one
a sox catch for rooting now

the worried elephant was a walker
the tired light from another galaxy

earth gets it all over again
in tired times
there will be a cheer
I’m getting closer to the river with every step

I’m pleased to introduce you to the heavenly monsters
powdered rats in baseball jeans
the life cereal will be provided at no cost

the pillsbury tock-tock at the little library
another ship has been spotted above houston

oh, it’s one of ours
“make it a bee day,”

says the cloud
the single word

the buffalo sun
all the way to the bridge

the lark is a bunting bud
faith in the feather
this one is the marbled sun
the tree
the dollar sign
the mushroomed earth
the steak of the eye

in the sink
the stuffy wing

a news danger
a beard of angelic moss

the talking scythe’s charm
it’s either an actuarial farm or the sports section
saint fred
the plains santa
leisure
to the left
in the chicken hut

one of them was
a knife
a chance to win(d)
elf-o
among the wolves is the wilbur
in the darkness
in the tree
and the hulk is winning

the brain of the sleeping skull
in the spray of the furnace
the bowl of earth

I know
forestry paul
a little scientific
this loose leaf apple
J.L. Moultrie
Ruination
I admit it: I was jealous of Nadia. How could I not be? She had everything: the looks, the car, the hair,
the family, the money and the boy toy. I had nothing; or, more precisely, too much of what I didn’t want.
I returned home from school only to find my mother passed out on our dingy, carpeted floor. Again.
Only this time she’d peed herself, too. I dropped my backpack, picked her up, stripped her and ran a bath; the
feeling of hot water brought a semblance of lucidity.
Her medium-brown eyes opened, she laughed and began speaking gibberish. The familiar scent of
brown liquor wafted into my face. I put on some coffee, sat on the couch and turned on the television.
My father used to say that everything we “forget” has only momentarily returned to our subconscious
and that we have to be patient during the process of retrieval. In other words: knowledge is never lost, just
temporarily inaccessible. He doesn’t talk like that anymore. In fact, we haven’t spoken in months. He’s the one I
came out to at fourteen. It was one of those early summer afternoons when the clouds are so grey and
voluminous that it seems like it will rain, but it doesn’t. My eyes were affixed to the sky when the words left my
mouth. My muscles were tense and my heart throbbed as if my body was bracing for a violent collision.
“How long have you known, Michael? How do you know?”

It felt like he asked me how long I’ve had skin.
I told him I’d known since I was little, right before he and my mother moved on separate sides of the
city. I told him I hadn’t acted on it, but I knew it to be truer than anything.
My father looked forward steadily, holding the steering wheel. Silence permeated the blue Honda
Accord that my mother gave him as a parting gift after they split. All that could be heard was the droning V6
engine, indistinct voices, the refrain of the blinker and the music from nearby cars.
We drove through the good neighborhood where he took me and my cousin’s trick-or-treating when
we were kids. This is where Nadia stayed. We ran in the same circles, but both of us were quiet, so we hardly
spoke directly to one another. We often traded glances between the bodies of our friends. I turned my head and
peered past the lush lawn, litter-free sidewalk, semi- circle driveway, weeping willow tree, Maserati
Quattroporte and Porsche 911 at her bedroom window.
We stopped at a red light. I wanted to neatly fold the distance between us until we stood abreast.
He asked me who else I’d told.
“You’re the first,” I said, “I don’t want anything to change between us. I can’t take not having a father. I
can’t take being more alone than I already am.”
“I’ll never abandon you, Michael. Don’t worry about that. If anything, I have to be there for you more.”
My father had a history of promising things in the heat of the moment, but not following through
when it really counted. This time would be no different.
Six months after my coming out, Nadia suddenly disappeared. Talk began to spread that she’d been
sent to live with relatives back east. Some said she got pregnant by her boyfriend and was sent away; others said
she ran away and joined a commune of artists in New York.
Her parents heard what was being said and tried to behave like nothing had changed, except they
stopped going to church. This only made the town more suspicious and excited. It was said that Nadia’s
boyfriend was left in the dark like everyone else. He transferred to a different high school for senior year.
The years passed, but I never forgot about Nadia. I felt that an affinity, abbreviated and unspoken,
persisted between us. I was seventeen, drifting further and further from the places I wanted to be. My mother
got her second DUI and was forced to go to long-term rehab out west. I went to stay with dad. He worked
nights at a local factory, which made the soft expanse of night seem infinite.
After graduating, I worked odd jobs throughout the city: at a tire shop, a potato chip factory, a produce
market and an automotive plant. I then caved in further and began attending classes at a university in a different
county. That’s when it happened.
I was dragging myself to an early morning history class when I bumped into her. Nadia stepped onto
the elevator; her long dark hair was in a ponytail, she wore a white, button-up blouse, denim blue jeans and
carried what looked like a vintage, cross-body Chanel bag. Only her and I were on the elevator.
“Don’t tell anyone you saw me, Michael. Please.”
“You have nothing to worry about. Trust me, Nadia. I’m just glad you’re safe. You’ve been here the
whole time?” “My folks have a cottage north of here; that’s where I’ve been since I left. Trying to be. Trying to
find out who I am. Something I couldn’t do around cliques, the people who thought they knew me, my folks
and all the bullshit. It’s a long story, but I’m an assistant English professor here. You were worried about me?
How’ve you been?”
“I was - you just vanished. The town talked, but I wasn’t hearing it. It wasn’t anyone’s business. I had
enough problems of my own, anyway.”
Later that day, I found myself wishing I had that luxury of anonymity; of being free from the confines
of outside expectations and interpretations. The thought of divulging her secret crossed my mind but left as fast
as it came.
I’d been hanging onto the edge of Earth; my mother returned from rehab and fell into the same routine
and my father and I only spoke to one another over breakfast. My bonds were volatile and tenuous.
Nadia was the second person I told I was gay. How could it not have been? Some nights we managed
to sneak away to one of her haunts: an innocuous-looking dive bar out in the sticks. Everything I felt in those
months was brief and inundated by deep, chilly water. By the end of the semester, I’d gained a best friend and
lost touch with my father, who, for the longest, was the only stable part of my life.
“You don’t speak to me anymore,” he began, “how am I supposed to continue to know my son if he acts
this way? You used to tell me everything. Now, I’d be lucky to hear about your week. Today’s your day off,
right? Where’re you going this early?”
I told him I was going to put in some extra study hours with some classmates at the library. It was a lie.
The tension between he and I festered so much that I began spending nights at Nadia’s cottage.
I went from being a boy riven by his own shyness to a young adult who, when confronted by the
prospect of free-will and its implications, was perpetually on the verge of drowning. My nascent confidence
coincided with my becoming aware of the latent, dull ennui that pervades every aspect of modern life.
Nadia had her entire life planned out, but unfortunately, so did her folks. I noticed she had a few too
many one night and put her in the passenger seat of her Audi. A couple of shady guys were standing at the
entrance eyeing us as we pulled off. She spoke softly while raindrops pattered on the windshield and thunder
rolled in the distance. “I went away because I had an abortion. My parents wanted me to keep it. No, they
demanded I keep it. What would you have done Michael? What’s a girl to do?”
She tried to laugh, but tears glimmered in her sleepy, hazel eyes.
When I got her home, I wrapped her in a blanket and put her in bed. I laid on her couch and tried to
sleep but it remained far out of reach. Instead, fresh dread burrowed under my skin like shrapnel.
Jack e Lorts
Simultaneously Reading Biographies of

Dali, Isherwood and Koufax
I recall meeting with them

on a July morning
in 1947
in East St. Louis.
One of them,
a mere lad of 12,
decades from accomplishment,
the others, contemporaries
in mid-career.
Someone reminisced of Berlin

in the 30’s,
of the boys of summer,
dwarf monkeys,
of Auden & Spender.
Another dreamt of
of meeting Stan the Man,
the boys of Berlin,
false childhood memories.
Yet another recalled
Lorca, Picasso, Galuchka
on the floor of a barn,
looking forward to
pitching a perfect game.
They meld together with
Winfield Townley Scott,
Hank Williams and
Ralph Kiner,
in the Arcadia Theatre in Wichita,
the spring of 1957
singing “Kawliga,”
visiting the statue
@ Lake Martin, Alabama,
hitting home runs
“to the glory of God”
in Forbes Field,
broadcasting Mets games forever,
a letter from a poet
drifting through Wichita...
Jack Skelley
Phantom Body
I watched you so often

dressing at the mirror
examined you like an x-ray
every turn of torso and face
felt our fingers intertwine
and your shoulders fold into mine
our pulse and breath in sync.
Like a dismembered limb

that lives in memory and pain
I incorporated you
and now your body
is a phantom body
moving through mine
long after you left.
And though it doesn’t speak

and dissolves as I reach
through the air
it almost hourly bows my head
presses my chest and throat
until I choke out your name
each time swearing not to again.
Hollywood Forever Cemetery Tour Guide
for Karie Bible
Yes, gravestones too,

like the roses around them,
fade, crumble and decay,
even those of “forever” celebrities.
But at least these stars
are privileged with a second life
in the firmament of fame
until the day their last fan dies.
‘It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.’
Melville’s white horror includes:

- Great sharks and pissed-off polar bears.
- Whitecaps and blizzards.
- Zeus as a bleached bull raping Europa.
- Blinding sea-squalls & Coleridge’s cursed albatross.
- Vast void of the Milky Way.
- The marble pallor of cadavers, the pale sheets that wrap them, and the shrouded spirits they become.
To these we add KKK robes & white terror.
Appalling, pale, pallid, pallor, ghastly, ghostly, blind, blank, bleach-blond, blanch, milk, moloko.
Whale, wallow, white, whirl, wail, veil, vile.
Melville: …By its indefiniteness it stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.
The dumb natural world – heartless immensity – is always poised to destroy.
Via fire or fascism.
To white ash.
Jacob McShane
DETOURS
“An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why
the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.”
—Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism
Le Tour De France 1904, Stage 2, Lyon to Marseille
2;32 AM in the lavender fields 30km between Lyon & Saint Étienne
Every now and then, the perpetual motion of the universe rocks the boat a bit too much, and God starts
to feel queasy. His mouth, which we call Time, consumes all things and keeps him sated on his endless voyage.
But when Time eats too much and the cosmic waters get choppy, God, feeling a painful urgency, scrunches up
the muscles in his belly and lets loose a world.
Staring down at what was his breakfast, Henri remembers this story his grandmother used to tell to
sooth his stomach. It wasn’t true, he knew, but it made him feel better. In the bone broth there’s life, in the bile
there’s death, and everything outside these two infinities can be abandoned. Women, children, and bicycle races
— all can be opted out of. As the other riders pass, and Henri retches in the lavender fields, Monsieur
Desgrange, the race director, pulls up in his horseless buggy. He picks up Henri’s bicycle and rests it on the car.
“Treat her with respect, she’s your lover.”
“I can’t go on. My legs…my head… I’m in too much pain.”
Desgrange puts his hand on Henri’s shoulder. “My boy, do you realize the gravity of the commitment
you’ve made? You accepted this singular path knowing you couldn’t return. You’ve abdicated your will to me.
No, you can’t quit. You will hurt but we will make you great. Come, get on your bike. We are healed of
suffering only by experiencing it in full.”
If young journalist Géo Lefèvre could take photographs in the dark he would capture this powerful
moment. The way the moonlight shines on the long-suffering and stalwart face of Monsieur Desgrange, whose
jaw is harder than German steel… the desperation in the boy’s big, trusting cow-eyes… a homesick little soldier
under the muscular wing of an eagle…
If he wants his writing to sell, Géo must do away with the wartime language. What readers of L'Auto-
Vélo want is uncomplicated entertainment — the simulated melodrama of sport, as opposed to the theater of
L’Affaire Dreyfus. A French artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongfully convicted of passing secrets to the
Germans, but, even though the real culprit is known, Dreyfus is still under house arrest. Why? because Dreyfus,
like Géo, is a Jew.
There’s always been unthinking intolerance, but Dreyfus awoke this subconscious beast. Mobs, when
they heard the news, stormed Jewish shops and assailed Jews in the streets, but the beast’s fangs were sharpest in
the papers. Calls for Jews to be ‘stewed in oil’ or to be ‘circumcised up to the neck’ were circulated by the mob’s
upper-class instigators, including Géo’s bosses at Le Vélo. When his identity was found out, Géo was told to
‘ask the Rothschild’s for a job,’ and, after a fierce objection by his editor (one Henri Desgrange), both were sent
on their ways. But Monsieur Desgrange, who set the original 24-hour record on the bike, was a stranger neither
to endurance nor sponsorship. He founded the competing paper L'Auto-Vélo, hired Géo as his journal tender,
and, to boost advertising profits, made a new beast to fill the bottomless stomach of public amusement: Le Tour
de France. Sired by progress, born in conflict, nurtured by nationalism, and forged in iron foundries, the bicycle,
raised on dirt and cobbled roads, is the perfect machine for the mania of the moment.
The riders set out from a café in Lyon at midnight, and they’re expected in Marseille by sunset.
Responsible for fueling themselves, the Garin brothers, originating in that region of the Alps where national
identities are rocky, ate 18 chicken cutlets, two kilos of rice, and drank four liters of a champagne and coffee
mixture, all in preparation for today’s stage. Maurice, despite the wind drag from his handlebar moustache, is
favored to win, and has his brother César up front setting a hard pace. Leaving Lyon, the cobblestones turn to
dirt rutted by runoff, and the dull suffering of shoulders, groins, wrists and backs slowly sets in. Their bikes,
which are playfully called ‘bone shakers’ because of their rigid wrought-iron frames, wooden wheel rims, and
lack of suspension, are more like medieval torture devices, the longer you ride, than a form of transportation.
With a dim light illuminating the rugged way, César leads the peloton of 50-some-odd riders, helmetless, with
his brother swaggering in his slipstream.
“Take a pull,” he jabs at his rivals, “or are your legs too weak already?”
‘Hippolyte the Terrible’, as Géo calls him, has thighs the size of the Matterhorn and could suffocate the
peloton if the oysters in his gut weren’t guffawing.
“Hippo! Hippo! his legs too fat to ride this fast,” sings Maurice as the gradient gradually steepens. “His
ass too fat to ride uphill, he’s swill! he’s swill! he has no skill…”
“You macaronis talk too much,” replies Hippolyte, suppressing a burp, “go and bugger your brother, I’ll
be in the winner’s circle.”
“You’ll have to murder me first.” As Maurice responds, a fresh-faced rider, new on the scene, unnamed
by the press car and unknown in the bunch, slingshots off Hippolyte’s wheel, sparking it out of the saddle,
launching his attack up the Col de la Lavande. César starts to close it down, but Maurice yells “let him go, it’s
just a peasant who want a turn in the spotlight.”
•
It is said in the village of Lavande that Julien, the unnamed rider widening his lead, doesn’t have his
heart in the right place. Since he was a boy, it’s been Julien’s job to shuttle his family’s lavender to the markets
in Lyon and Saint Étienne. To and fro up this same mountain and down again, he knows every millimeter,
every undulation, and every rut by heart. Finding himself, a disadvantaged farm boy fed not by meat but by
vegetable soup, on the level playing field of his home hill, Julien’s chance at victory is fleeting and fast-
approaching. The lights of Lavande are less than a kilometer away and Julien’s heart, which, as rumor has it, is
not in his chest but in his pelvis where the bladder ought to be, flutters anxiously against his hip bones. What if
the barricades have been set too soon? or the Garins have bridged the gap? He looks back and, about a minute
behind, sees the headlamps of the peloton, pale beneath the stars. To his left and right rows of pungent purple
shrubs wave in the wind. Above, the humid field of constellations brims with ripe flowers, ready to be reaped.
Jupiter passes through the ram; fortune favors the absurd.
A strange kind of unity is given to large groups of people by the lives of single individuals. In Lavande,
where the tumbledown clay houses, dyed lilac like everything else, are wedged into the uneven hillside, and
there’s but one lonely road that leaks through, a crowd begins to take form. In the moonlight where there was
nothing but a breeze, a phenomenon fills the air, and a few people — first five, then twelve, then twenty — spill
out of their homes. Like brooks, babbling with fire in their bellies and on their torches, they combine to form a
fierce river, beating against the dam of normal order, ready for the violent discharge. In the service of the boy
with his heart between his legs, these hundred or so famers have gathered, with upturned feeding troughs and
buckets of bent nails, to build a barricade that even the Germans would be delayed by. As Julien approaches,
cresting the climb, cowbells ring, praises sing, and stomachs rumble, anxious to do harm.
“You should head out soon,” says Julien’s eldest sister Heloise, “they sound close.” The flames of the
hearth, since their mother died, have only grown stronger, and it is not unusual for Heloise, her twin Eloise and
their youngest sister Louise to be up this late tending the caldron and swapping rumors.
“In a second.” Eloise replies after a sip. Wine in Lavande is grown locally from bunco Chardonnay
grapes and infused with aromatic lavender. It is also not unusual for the sisters, when they’re up this late, to
drain dry several bottles of the heady, light-purple wine. “You’re not coming with?”
“No,” says Heloise, whose husband, Mathieu, is in the field fiddling with that ancient catapult, “too
many people, and…”
“And you’re still afraid of being touched?” asks Eloise, in jest since she knows the answer. Eloise, whose
pregnant belly is soothed by the strong wine, fears that Mathieu, the married virgin, is dangerously blocked up.
She sees the swelling in his pants and knows her own husband tortures Mathieu, while they’re working, with
lewd accounts of their bedroom.
“She told me,” Loise chimes in with her pubescent voice, “that a riot is no place for a woman. Can I
have more wine?”

“No place for a woman?” Eloise says, pouring all three another glass. “A riot is a feast, and do you really
want the men to cook? The sun will rise on corpses if we’re not there tonight,” her heart beats softly in her
pelvis, rocking her baby to sleep, “they’re all deranged.”
“Oi! Oi Mathieu!” Jean yells from the crowded road as he jaunts out into the field to investigate what
Mathieu and the kid Jacques are working on. The mayhem is about to begin — mayhem which a pent-up man
like Mad Mathieu would be woe to miss. Even in the moonlight, Jean, as he gets closer, can see the bulge in
Mathieu trousers. Jacques, a simpleton with a sickly composition who does nothing but read books in bed most
days, holds a light up to the antique killing machine. “What’re you workin’ on?”
Mathieu, without looking up, responds, “Finally fixin’ this damned catapult.”
“It’s been here since the Capetians fought the Saxons,” says Jacques with a grin, “and he thinks it’ll fire if
he replaces the ropes. But the wood’s all rotten…
“Shut your mouth and hold the light closer, it’ll work…” Mathieu barks, adjusting his pants, “oh… it’ll
work…tonight…”
Jean, as with most of the rioting villagers, is no stranger to sexual frustration, but this, he thinks, has got
to be the most pathetic manifestation he’s ever seen. Jacques is right: the wood of this dingy old machine is so
rotten Jean must cover his nose. Even with new ropes, it’ll crumple under the lightest weight, so, he asks, “Why
are you doing this? Julien is nearly here, and the other bicyclists are not far behind. Come and throw a punch or
two!”
“Blast that floppy blonde tit and his entire heartless family! I hope I hit him too.”
“He wants to launch manure out of this thing,” Jacques laughs, “if he gets it to fire.”
“But why?” Jean asks, alarmed at Mad Mathieu’s steep and sudden descent. “We’ll all get covered in shit.
If you must, why not throw paint? We had a batch go bad today.”
“Bleh! I’d rather be covered in shit than paint! At least shit is noble.” Mathieu bellows as he tightens the
final string. “I think your riders are here.”
Louise and Eloise, with a begrudging Heloise in tow, wobble out of their cottage in time to see Julien,
stomping on the pedals with all his might, blistering through the crowded road amid a thunderous roar by the
mob. The peloton is close behind, and the rioters, as if the road were a deep cut, rush to clot the gap with their
viscous bodies. Louise, with rocks gathered, leads her sisters into the thick black mass of lavender farmers.
There is nothing that Heloise fears more than the touch of the unknown. Even her dress gives insufficient
security; it is too easy to tear and pierce through to her naked, defenseless skin. The touch of her husband, Mad
Mathieu, she fears most of all, yet in the crowd, with flesh thronging to the nervous beat of bloodthirst, she
feels oddly at ease — as if her body were no longer her own; as if she were apart of something larger, univocal,
unambiguous, even divine. The voice of God is the voice of the people, she thinks, and that voice is armed with
a swift-striking sword.
•
César Garin, who has set a hard pace up the entire way, is ready to pull off and have himself a well-
deserved breath. Nearing the summit, he hears a great commotion and, as the quaint village comes into view, he
glimpses fans for the first time this stage.
“They’re out for me tonight!” gibes Maurice, sitting second wheel, “they want to witness greatness! Hear
that, Hippo? The crowd loves me.”
Hippolyte, at the limits of his stomach’s content, decides he’s had enough with Garin’s ceaseless shit-
talk, and sparks an attack of his own.
The slower speed up the climb has allowed the press car, driven by Géo with Monsieur Desgrange in the
passenger seat, to catch up to the tail end of the tight-bunched peloton. From this vantage, with the village but
a busy blur ahead, Géo can see a rider has launched and asks, “I think that’s Hippolyte the Terrible making a
move!”
Monsieur Desgrange, the silent and abiding type who, like a crude barometer, can sense atmospheric
disruptions in his gut, quietly fingers the pistol in his pocket.
“Looks like we’ve got some fans out, Boss. It’s the lavender farmers! Don’t we have a man from here?”
“Yes,” Desgrange responds after a deep and solemn breath “it’s the boy with his heart in his crotch.”
•
Hippolyte is the first to hit the nails, but, his heedless determination being that of a water horse, he
trucks on, with flat tires, into the crowd until his momentum is consumed, chewed up, and spit back out by the
belligerent crowd. The ambush has begun. Hippolyte rams into the wooden barricades, hits the deck, and is
seized upon by the mob. His bicycle is picked up and thrown at the less aggressive riders who, at feeling their
tires pop, wisely pulled over. But even they would not be left unscathed by the chaos. Rocks, as if the faucet of a
meteor shower were turned on high, start to rain down on these other riders. One is struck on the shoulder;
another on his helmetless head; a third is left unconscious all together. Perhaps Hippolyte, who’s since been
sucked deeper into the pitiless mass, wishes it was he who had been knocked out. The kicks of the crowd are
unrelenting. Spigots of his blood leak out onto the famers well-worn shoes. Ruptured is his spleen; shattered are
his ribs; and pulped is his perseverance.
Maurice, upon seeing Hippolyte go down, is filled with bile, and fights to free his rival from the clutch
of the mob. Géo, from the press car at the back of the pack, catches sight of Maurice as he cocks his fist and
unleashes onto Jean’s artless jaw. The horde attempts to hold him back, but Maurice fights forward as far as he
can get until an errant wine bottle strikes him on the temple, sending torrents of blood down his mustached
face. César, having been dragged through the nails, is similarly lacerated and is flung onto a heap of broken
bicycles. The wooden wheel rims catch fire with ease and, rushing to his aid, the otherwise uninvolved riders,
recognizing that this war will only be ended by massacre, fight with a ferocity Géo can only describe as
obligatory.
The rocks continue to fall — one with enough force to fracture the plate glass windshield. “We have to
do something!” Géo yells, “They’ll kill us all!” The fury of the horde has been fully unleashed, and several were,
indeed, shouting “Kill them! Kill them all! They’re friends of Germans and friends of Jews and they must die!”
The goal of a barricade, having been achieved, has given way to something larger; something existential. Energy
cannot so easily be destroyed, and the anxious beasts inside these humble farmers have been unleashed.
Monsieur Desgrange silently slips the pistol into young Géo’s clammy hand, and gestures towards the moon.
Jacques, having heard the awful noise of battered brains and bloodshed, rushed from Mathieu’s side and
buried himself in bed with his treasured Baudelaire: More corpses than the potter's field, or late or soon. A
graveyard, I, abandoned by the moon.
Back in the lavender fields, Mad Mathieu, alone and priapic, pulls the catapult’s ancient lever, but the
bucket, loaded with manure, won’t fire. Something must be jammed. Stepping back, he stumbles over a
lavender bush. He’s caught by the arm of the catapult and is, just as soon, is sprung into the air with explosive
velocity. And — Oh! he soars in the moonlight and everyone cries Oh! Oh! in rapture — Oh! in sweet release
— Oh! as he bursts into the scene.

•
The first time Géo Lefevre fired a gun he was petrified. Then, as with now, the gun had been slid into
his nervous hands by Monsieur Desgrange, who said, “Fire at the pheasants as if they are lies. That is your job
as a journalist: to murder myths and massacre false news. Your bullets are the facts and you are a soldier on the
side of truth.”
As he pointed Monsieur Desgrange’s pistol well above the mob’s head, taking dead aim at the moon, a
voice deep in the crowd yells out, “Look out! He’s got a gun!” Those with sense scurried away, and left the
assaulted riders to hemorrhage, but another voice, one that Géo will suffer with so long as his true heart beats,
trumpets “He’s a Jew! the Jew has a gun!” The unthinking mob lurches forward. Géo pulls the trigger and out of
the humid air falls Mad Mathieu, covering the crowd in cow shit and specks of his lifeless blood.
Julien, feeling refreshed, descends the other side of the Col de la Lavande briskly and with the peace of
mind that only long rides can give. His heart, between his legs, has slowed, and he has Time to think: If they’ve
done their job, then I will be the winner of the stage. My name will be in newspaper, and my suffering will not
be for nothing. But if they’ve failed, then at least I’m on my bicycle.

Jeffrey Letterly
[Devil starts to eat an apple a day]
DEVIL STARTS TO EAT AN APPLE A DAY, Red Delicious ones, special ordered from
Michigan, doesn’t care for the taste or texture, but admires their deep red, thinks
this new habit will keep doctors away, like it’s been said to for years, shaves his
beard, wife thinks it makes him look ten years younger, but she doesn’t say it, he
pays attention to sodium and sugars, goes for a walk every morning, two miles, four
miles, to the old movie theater and back, never noticed how uneven sidewalks are,
how many weeds pop up all over the place, notices his pants aren’t as tight in the
waist, notices that he now sleeps through the night, realizes how last Tuesday
everything started to taste like tacos, the apples like tacos, salad like tacos, oatmeal
like tacos, green tea like tacos, buttered raisin toast like tacos, pan-seared halibut
with lemon caper sauce like tacos, and when his cat meowed, it sounded like taco,
then the news anchormen talking, the cashiers, his coworkers, his wife, everything
tasting and sounding the same, for a good long time.
[Scratch off]
SCRATCH OFF, not a winner, scratch off, not a winner, scratch off, not a winner,
scratch off, one dollar, scratch off, not a winner, scratch off, five dollars, scratch off,
not a winner, scratch off, not a winner, scratch off, a pitchfork, scratch off, horns
and hooves and thick grin and wild eyes and pointed eyebrows and pointed chin
and pointed tail, the penny used to scratch off the silver-grey latex now shredded,
copper-coated zinc mangled, Lincoln and his memorial reduced to splinters, filings,
fingertip prick, blood on the ticket, aww shit, devil’s uncovered smirk now tripled.
[Yellow devil stays up too late]
YELLOW DEVIL STAYS UP TOO LATE, drinks too much coffee, eats too much fried
food, smokes too many cheap cigars, drives recklessly and dies too many times,
wakes up, just about every morning, socks and pants missing, front door open, left
cheek in a puddle of his own sorrow, painkillers in one hand, antacids in the other,
Styrofoam containers of cold fries on the nightstand, flat diet cherry cola, burning
his dirty laundry in the tub, pigeons coming in through the window, salad mix now
a bag of sludge, an endless amount of one dollar bills dripping through a weakened
spot in the floor.
[Lazy eye]
LAZY EYE, squinting, tilting the head, brain favor, refractive error, every striped
devil has one, never gets fixed, untreated, incomplete, not discreet, they’re sent to a
home, on a dead end street, all those striped lazy-eyed devils crowded in a house,
cramming the rooms, laid in recliners, or standing with arms folded, are you looking
at me or him, all day long, me or him, tiresome song, something wrong, delete and
delete and delete.
Joan E. Bauer
Where I’m From
I’m from Bixby Knowles Hospital in Long Beach

& creamed spinach at Dinah’s on Sepulveda.
I’m from Jesus Saves! & A-bomb drills,

Chaucer & the chatter of UCLA’s Royce Hall.
I’m from coveted books at Dutton’s off Magnolia

& the matzo at Junior’s Deli in Westwood.
From my mother’s sun hats & Reader’s Digests

& ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ on the phonograph.
I’m from my zig & zag commute on Laurel Canyon

to teach news-writing, James Baldwin & Tolstoy.
I’m from my grandparents’ dining room mahogany

which some damn interloper painted over.
I’m from El Cholo on Western, Ross MacDonald mysteries

& my first apartment blocks from the Rampart station.
From Mars, the Red Planet & the missile design

my dad retrieved perilously from a firestorm.
I’m from the dinosaurs & tarpits on La Brea

& the mad prophesies of Joan Didion & Mike Davis.
I’m from palm trees, the calming scent of eucalyptus,

& a magic tunnel that opens to the gleaming Pacific.
Booker T. Washington in Sicily, 1910
What brought him to the yellow sulphur mines

of Campofranco, stories of the ‘negro-like’ people
in a lawless underworld south of Palermo.

Told he’d encounter ‘inferior race’ brigands,
unsuitable for the ‘uplift through work & thrift’

he espoused, instead he found:
landless families living in ‘dirt, poverty & squalor’

in single rooms, no chimney for cooking.
Straw beds. A flour paste used to fill gaps

in the walls. He found the carusi, sold by their families
to overseers, children who grew old quickly

or died young. He found peasants crushed by overseers,
taxes & the omertà, the conspiracy of silence enforced

by a Mafia that reminded him of the Klan.
He found the mine workers ‘hospitable’

though they worked in hellish, suffocating fumes,
naked underground. At 100 per cent humidity,

110 degrees Fahrenheit, the body can’t survive clothed.
Washington confessed: he was ‘perplexed’ by Sicily.
The vice-grip of church & gentry. Villages ‘saturated

by antiquity.’ A treeless land with exhausted soil.
Dull-eyed children carrying back-breaking bundles

of sulphur to be shipped to America: for gunpowder.
Washington would remember the sulphur mines of Sicily

as ‘the nearest thing to hell I expect to see in this life.’
The Sicilian Detective
When Andrea Camilleri at 60 began writing mysteries

set in the fictional Sicilian port city of Vigàta,
he was a director, screenwriter & professor steeped

in Pirandello, Samuel Beckett & Georges Simenon.
His protagonist, Inspector Montalbano, while cultured

& molto simpatico, can be moody & impatient.
He has his problems: bumbling subordinates, the sluggish

burocrazia & the hazards of doing the right thing
on an island hobbled by crime & corruption, brutality

& intrigue. Montalbano takes solace in books, banter,
his late-night swim, the sun-drenched days. He’s also

devoted to striped mullet & pasta with black ink sauce.
Camilleri’s plots often turn on the fate of immigrants,

as his fast-cut narratives delight us with comedic dialog
& heaping portions of Sicilian cuisine. A leftist & atheist,

Camilleri is especially sympathetic to the immigrants
from Tunisia, Bangladesh, Libya, Egypt & so we witness

fishermen rescuing migrants at sea, regardless of homeland.
In Camalleri’s novels, Inspector Montalbano remains

an honorable man & ‘good wins out.’
Not so in Mediterranean Noir, the work of younger writers

like Massimo Carlotto, who himself served time.
In their taut & bloody tales, everyone’s compromised
as fiction reveals the gruesome reality journalism cannot.
Camilleri was asked, did he fear the Mafia?

‘They kill journalists, not novelists.’
Joe Gianotti
Ceuta
She strides into the House of the Dragons,

fire brimming from below,
but she does not burn.
Her bare feet saunter across hot coals.
The charms around her ankles
sizzle into dust,
but the flames only lap her legs.
She controls the sun.

It orbits her right iris,
red around brown,
like the the Arab baths,
where Medina women
alternated cold water with warm.
Blocked by her Royal Walls,

she gazes down on us from the Marinid Towers,
bronze tipped arrows aimed
at our privileged hearts.
She is like the Pillars of Hercules,

flanked by Gibraltar,
attended to by Cleopatra,
Caligula, Claudius.
To know her is to feel her choke point.
If she opens her palm to you,

take refuge in its creases.
If she wraps you around her finger,
clasp it and don’t let go.
If she feasts on you,
sacrifice yourself
and swim in her waters,
a mediterranean of siren and song.
Control
A rubber band stretched

until beige fractures to vanilla,
a Baltimore Bulls-Eye ready to flash.
You spread me between

your index finger
and your thumb,
twist me for accuracy,
shoot me across the room
with childlike whimsy.
In a museum,
look but don’t touch,
cross a line,
sound an alarm,
the cold stare of a docent.
You choose the galleries we visit.

Post-impressionists, surrealists,
Seurat and Ernst,
throbbing with blues,
sometimes a merciful brush,
sometimes a harsh stroke.
The midnight conversation,

waiting
for delivered
to switch to read.
Calculating the seconds
between gray thought bubbles.
You define sleep,

the unremembered dreams
of an insomniac heart.
I twist beneath linens,
first a jack
with rapid responses,
then a knave
who knows you’re elsewhere.
You strike my keyboard

from miles away.
You seek synonyms,
and metastasize metaphors,
but,
from a distance,
like the goddess Eris,
offering her golden apple,
causing delightful mischief.
Renaissance girl
Michelangelo would have carved your profile in marble.

The detail of your black-tie affair,
the gingham dress,
silken white blouse underneath,
sleeves that rest on the radius and ulna.
DaVinci blended your eye makeup,

the upper lids in sfumato
like the Lady with Ermine.
Tintoretto curled your hair,
the right side dropping into your face.
Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t have ordered your lips

that make men lean into their cameras
to ponder hidden tongue, teeth, and throat.
You blow chiaroscuro smoke,
back up, bend one leg at the knee,
sing the funk, and blaze a smile
worthy of the Sistine Chapel
that I pretend is only for me.
You are Vittoria Colonna.

You own the last two weeks of my Renaissance,
Boccacio’s dream teleported to the 21st century,
sent images,
poetry before I ever write it down.
This text is easy, too simple,

a poem that oozes from my fingertips
like Botticelli’s oils.
You are the birth of Venus,
my prosperity, my desire,
the fertility of the River Tiber.
Hold me like sand in your palm.
Tighten your fingers. Don’t let me slip through,
back to the Amalfi beaches, unidentifiable
amidst the trillions of grains
that want to cling to your sun-soaked skin.
Put me on a pedestal, sculpt me,
excise my heart and make me live without it.
Place it in the caverns beneath
the duomo di Siena,
retrieve it at your pleasure,
buried along with wine and whiskey.
Remove my cap, drink,
smile with me in your mouth,
and swallow me
so that I crash against the pit of your stomach,
Verroccio’s David, at your beck and call.
John Tavares
Year 2000 Problem
Char shot her boyfriend during the previous autumn’s hunting season. The young man died of the
gunshot injuries from her rifle, after an agonizing few weeks in the intensive care unit in Thunder Bay, where
he was flown by air ambulance. During their moose hunting trip, Char brandished a vintage Canadian army
rifle, which she inherited from her father, along with his Northwest Grocer store, which she first managed after
her father retired. Shauna, well versed in the gossip and rumors around town, from her perch in the elevated
office above Amelia’s Food Pantry store, told her partner Char had become estranged from her father, because
of accusations, she said, she made against him. In any event, Char’s boyfriend’s death had been ruled an
accident. Amelia felt dubious the young man was even her boyfriend. If they were involved in an intimate as
opposed to professional relationship, Amelia believed it was of an idiosyncratic Platonic nature. Amelia didn’t
like to gossip about love lives and local affairs, but, earlier, Shauna persisted in asking her questions about their
relationship and forced her to speculate. Shauna wanted to try recruiting Antin, a twentysomething newcomer
with a degree in business administration, to manage the student and part-time employees in their grocery store.
Despite her memories, Amelia flatly said Char was probably still a virgin—a remark which made Shauna
wonder. After the accidental shooting, Char didn’t face criminal charges; the old school commander of the local
police detachment remained mindful of the fact she was the daughter of a World War Two bomber pilot. Her
father had been commended for his courage while flying a crippled, bullet-riddled, shrapnel-ridden Lancaster
over bombing targets in industrial Germany. Likewise, as founder of the Northwest Grocer store, which Char
inherited, her father was considered a pillar of the community, who donated money for the Catholic church
roof and the town beach park. The police commander even complimented Char on her diligence and care in
firearms handling. Her boyfriend had been her right-hand man, a young man half her age, who worked as her
assistant manager. The local police commander asked Amelia about Antin as if he was a suspect instead of an
alleged victim of an accidental discharge of a .303 bullet from Char’s father’s bolt-action military rifle during a
hunting expedition. Amelia said she grew up with Char and still liked her after all these years, but she was the
competition now. She hardly ever spoke to her, except at Rotary Club meetings and Chamber of Commerce
dinners and banquets, and even there Char was usually curt and dismissive. Amelia suspected Char was
suffering from mental illness, particularly after the death of her so-called boyfriend and then the death of her
terminally ill father. Shauna told her Char had personally disconnected her father’s life support, including his
oxygen. Now, with her deep-set frown, her tired demeanor, Amelia thought Char always looked unhappy and
miserable. Amelia believed she had become a recluse and remained skeptical of the nature of her relationship
with the young man, who lived at a separate house, which Char owned. Amelia suspected Char had never been
involved in an intimate relationship with Antin. She believed their connection was probably more small-town
rumor and gossip, of the kind in which Shauna enjoyed partaking with meticulous devotion and enthusiasm.
Amelia recalled Antin, who lived down the street in their neighborhood, near the golf course and curling club,
had even installed closed circuit cameras—no small expense—above the driveway and front door after this small
backyard house he rented from Char was vandalized.
Knowing Char, Amelia couldn’t resist speculating she was somehow behind the incident, even though
she owned the house. As the daughter of Portuguese immigrants, Amelia grew up with Char, attended the
same Catholic elementary school and the same public high school. The pair even developed a close relationship
in middle school. Char constantly invited her to her house to play baseball and football. She remembered how
hard she threw the baseball at her. One late spring evening when she walked to her house, she stopped to chat
with Jess, a mutual classmate, now the owner and manager of a local travel agency, as she strolled on the
sidewalk past Char’s house. Char kept calling to her impatiently from her upstairs bedroom window.
Afterwards, Char wouldn’t admit she was jealous, but she was surprised how much harder she threw the
baseball at her that late spring evening. Char threw the ball, not a softball but a smaller dense baseball, hard and
fast, and she persistently increased the velocity of each throw. Once, she feared, her pitch broke the small bones
in her hand when she managed to catch the fastball she whipped at her. Still, she nurtured an affection for
Char; she wasn’t feminine or effeminate or weak, and she considered her beautiful. She thought she didn’t have
to worry about touching her, or saying the wrong thing, or offending her unintentionally. Char was tomboyish
and easily shrugged off most of the girlish and boyish stuff, pranks, and antics in which she engaged, alongside
friends.
Later that summer, they agreed to meet at the public library. There she found their mutual classmate,
Jess. Char started reading outdoor and hunting and fishing and women’s magazines with her, laughing, joking,
nudging, rubbing, knocking, and kicking their legs together beneath the library table. After browsing through
hardcover books in the stacks, Char felt stunned when she borrowed a gothic romantic mystery paperback book
at the circulation desk and saw Amelia at a table with Jess; she didn’t think other classmates, aside from boys,
socialized with her. Still, she invited her over to the house later that evening. They sipped iced tea on her house
steps in the unseasonably warm late spring sun. When the mosquitoes became annoying, the duo moved to the
gazebo. Amelia wondered aloud if Char was upset with her, because she didn’t have much to say, but they
played catch afterwards. Char pitched and hurtled the hard baseball at her at extremely high speed. Amelia
never played baseball with anyone her age, male or female, who could pitch the ball so hard and fast and with
such an accurate aim. Still, she managed to catch every throw she pitched at her. Each time the ball landed in
the worn leather baseball gloves with a slap. When she checked her hand, she noticed the force of the ball
striking her hand bruised her palm. Then Char wound up and the vigor of her windup and the intensity of her
facial expression should have warned Amelia, before she threw the baseball and struck her in the groin. Amelia
dropped like a rock, clutching her crotch, screaming in agony. Afterwards, when she went to the washroom and
tried to urinate, she was stricken with pain and her vagina was bruised and swollen and blood streaked her
urine. She walked around, in pain and discomfort, with a limp for several days afterwards.
Char laughed after she struck her, although her mother first insisted on calling the ambulance. When
Amelia refused that help, Char’s mom tried calling the family doctor, a neighbor, with whom she was friends.
Amelia thanked Char’s mom for her concern, but waved her off, and walked her bicycle home, sobbing softly,
convinced Char aimed the ball at her privates deliberately.
Still, they continued to spend time together, playing catch, taking walks. The very last time Amelia
dropped by her house, Char was arguing fiercely with her father, who, retreating from the slaps of his daughter,
literally threw coins at her—money to get ice cream cones at the corner convenience store, which was near
Amelia’s house. The convenience store had a restaurant and dining area where Amelia liked to drink coffee and
hot chocolate and play on the pinball machines and read magazines, comic books, and used paperback books
available on the bookshelves. Char told Amelia her father had seen her take a Playboy magazine from the
magazine rack one night. Char added her mother didn’t want her hanging around her, but she didn’t care. They
argued over who should pay for the soft ice cream cones, and they playfully fought over the packet of crushed
peanuts and colored chocolate candy sprinkles. Char said she could pay for the ice cream during their next
outing, except, as events developed, Amelia never had the opportunity to repay her. They walked along Fair
Street, and Amelia showed her the first house, a small bungalow, which her parents bought after they first
immigrated to Canada and landed in town, where her father worked as a track maintainer on the railroad.
Amelia said the house was small, but she had fond memories of growing up in the bungalow and wandering the
trails in the nearby bushes. Char insisted she take her down the trails she liked to explore. They walked along
the trail to where she earlier built a treehouse with her friends, in the forest near the fence that fringed the
municipal airport.
“Is this where you read your dirty girlie magazines,” Char said mischievously, with a titter, which caused
Amelia to blanch and then blush. Char reached down between Amelia’s belt and her denim pants. Amelia
always wore boy’s blue jeans and Char figured that was because she had four considerably older brothers and
wore their hand-me-downs. Char groped her and tried to finger her, but Amelia was wearing a pair of briefs
beneath her insulated long underwear and her denim pants. Amelia’s boyish clothing style left her confounded,
amazed at all those layers of under garments and underwear, long johns and briefs, some kind of Northern
Ontario chastity belt, she wore in the warm sweaty weather. In a Catholic panic, Amelia clenched Char’s wrist
and pulled her hand away from her underwear, where her thumb hooked and scraped on her belt and the front
of her pants. Amelia even pushed her hand and twisted her arm away. Amelia later wondered if she gripped
Char’s wrist too firmly; she certainly had intended to grapple and wrangle with her. Char turned around and
belted her, punching her with her balled fist harder than anyone, friend, or foe, had ever slapped or struck her,
including her mother, or any teachers. Then Char hurried down the bush trail and rushed home down the street
alone, while Amelia chased after her, trying to keep up to her, trying to apologize. Afterwards, Char stopped
calling her and inviting her over to her house. She thought that blow effectively ended their extracurricular
relationship.
After she graduated from high school, Amelia went to work for the owner of the grocery store, Food
Pantry, which competed with Char’s father’s Northwest Grocer. Amelia’ boss eventually sold his store to her,
after a few decades of loyal employment, during which she worked as cashier, clerk, produce manager, dairy
merchandiser, butcher, floor manager. So, Amelia became Char’s commercial competitor and friendly rival.
As they matured, Amelia couldn’t escape the conclusion Charmain, attractive, hardworking, intelligent,
suffered from mental illness. After her father went into heart failure and suffered from Alzheimer’s, she took
over management of her father’s grocery store—but, Amelia thought, she always looked unhappy and worn
down. Earlier she heard rumors—about fights and arguments with her parents, during which she brandished a
knife or a rifle. She heard she made accusations against her father, but, when Shauna pressed her for details,
Amelia didn’t think it appropriate to discuss them. When Amelia went to her high school reunion, which Char
didn’t bother to attend, she saw her former classmate in a bikini swimming alone at the beach; she became
smitten and infatuated with her again until she concluded it was better for everybody’s mental health if she
forgot. She realized she was happiest and most content with her Playboy and Playgirl magazines; with pictorials
she had no worries or complications with women, children, diseases, odors, all the messy things in life and love
that drove adults to unhappiness, drink, and self-destruction. She could find her escape in beautiful nude
women in a glossy magazine and return to her life as a grocer, after a shower and a bath and obsessively washing
her vagina and hands.
Anyway, now she had Shauna, who she originally hired as office manager, doing the store payroll,
accounting, and human resources, after she moved from Winnipeg. Eventually, Shauna and Amelia started
spending time together. Since she couldn’t find an affordable and a respectable and decent apartment, she
offered Shauna her furnished basement, which Shauna said she liked when she went to the house to retrieve
accounting records from Amelia’s home office. So, Shauna moved into Amelia’s house, and eventually Amelia’s
accountant became her partner. But Shauna didn’t want to have sex. Oddly enough, after a time, it didn’t
matter; Amelia still had her Playboy and Playgirl magazines.
On this particular day, Amelia wasn’t quite certain why Char visited her store. She observed her through
the window in her office, where she perused and closely examined her fresh produce, green bananas, oranges,
and apples. Amelia heard her grocery store had run into financial problems; some had said she made bad
decisions around the time of Y2K—investing in expensive computer equipment and security systems for her
store. Char even bought a brand-new assault rifle, which could be modified into a fully automatic weapon, on
top of the armory of rifles, shotguns, and sidearms she already owned. For Y2K, she camped in the business
office of her store overnight on December 31, 1999, expecting riots, mayhem, and cyber warfare at the toll of
midnight and the dawning of the New Millennium, but nothing happened. She stood on guard in her office
when the year 2000 rolled around, expecting the apocalypse, instead of being at the Legion celebrating the New
Year with the rest of the leading members of the community, but she had always been the odd person out. She
also rejected Amelia’s offer to buy her store. Now not only was Char struggling to compete with Amelia, but
also with the new big box stores and discounters in Dryden.
Now, since Amelia feared her encounter with her would cause her stress, she took a nitroglycerin tablet
and went down to the produce department. Amelia strolled down to the main floor of the supermarket, where
Char examined the apples and oranges in the produce section. Amelia said a courteous hello and asked her how
she was doing, but Char merely glared at her, as if she offended her in some disreputable way. Char took a
leisurely stroll out of the store, taking a huge bite from the large apple, tossing, and catching the shiny Red
Delicious apple like a baseball, as she whizzed past the checkout counter, while the cashier stared at her as she
passed through the automated door. Amelia merely shrugged and returned to her office.
Later that day, Shauna said her rival Northwest Grocer, which Char had inherited from her father, had
just went out of business and the front doors were padlocked. The manager was in the middle of closing Char’s
small business accounts when Shauna made the daily Food Pantry deposits and receipts at the bank.
That night, after she closed her Food Pantry store, Amelia drove downtown to the site of Char’s
Northwest Grocer on Front Street. When she saw the storefront was dark, she stepped out of her pickup truck.
She walked further down the block, the main street abandoned, lending the main thoroughfare the bleak
ethereal mood of a ghost town. When Amelia could see no sight of Char or anyone around, she walked back
up the street and saw her sign, “Closed: Gone shopping to Dryden.” Amelia supposed that was a dig towards all
her former patrons who no longer shopped local but drove the sixty miles to Dryden to shop at the
supermarkets and discount stores, the Walmarts and the Safeways, in the mill town on the TransCanada
highway. Through the gaps in the butcher paper and grocery store flyers, advertising deboned chicken breasts
for .99 cents a pound, and whole grain sliced bread for 1.99 a loaf, which covered the Front Street facing display
windows, she could see the mostly empty supermarket shelves. Amelia realized her competition, around for the
past forty years, before she even assumed ownership of her Food Pantry store, which she bought from her
former employer, who even co-signed the bank loans, was closed, probably forever. She felt sympathy for Char,
but she no longer had to worry about local competition, and hunting season had started, and moose hunting
was her favorite form of recreation. Amelia needed the fresh air and stress relief of the outdoors and decided the
following day, a Sunday, she would hunt. She thought she shouldn’t be surprised if she saw her on the trails,
since, taking after her father, from whom she inherited Northwest Grocer, she enjoyed hunting on the logging
and country roads, long abandoned, and trails outside of town. Sometimes Amelia even came across her, with
her high-powered rifle, in her blaze orange vest and orange toque.
That Sunday morning, Amelia skipped church and parked her four-wheel drive pickup truck near the
creek and beaver dam, when she realized she risked getting stuck in the mud and ruts of the worn logging road.
Besides, she didn’t want to scratch the paint job on her pickup truck, which she also used as a company vehicle.
She sometimes asked the stock boys to make home deliveries of groceries to a few select, high-paying
customers, with her brand-new pickup truck. She figured Char couldn’t afford to make deliveries of groceries,
although when her father owned the store, the old man did make deliveries, if the customer requested and
bought plenty of groceries. Anyway, Amelia didn’t want the rough twigs and branches growing thickly
alongside the narrow logging road, damaging the exterior of her truck, scratching the fresh paint. She parked
beside a creek and beaver dam, and, as she walked along the logging road, the quietness and serenity of the
surroundings in the bush had a tranquilizing effect. Her peaceful state of mind was interrupted when she saw
Char’s mud coated red Jeep, which she had inherited from her father and used for hunting, hauling fire wood,
and walleye and smallmouth bass fishing. Char was also hunting along Lost Lake Road, a few kilometers from
where Amelia parked her pickup truck. The details and surroundings were so sharp and in focus—the greyness
of late fall foliage, the brightness of the patches of white snow, the stillness of the coniferous forests, the
greyness of the skies. Amelia experienced a sense of oneness with nature. Amelia told Shauna she worried about
Char, after her father died and she was forced to close her store, when the business went bankrupt, a victim of
competition from the big box stores and the new discount supermarkets in Dryden.
Amelia munched on a sausage and crusty bun, wrapped in tinfoil, from the bakery department in her
supermarket, as she hiked along the logging road. Despite her lack of diligence as a hunter, she still expected to
spot a moose. Then Amelia spotted a moose, but, noisily chewing bread and pulled pork, she startled the young
bull with the noise from her food wrapper. The young bull moose quickly crashed ahead into the bushes at the
side of the logging road. Amelia tried to trail the moose, but the late autumn snow was melting and the tracks
faded in the foliage and undergrowth. She continued to peer through the brush, trying to locate the tracks of
the moose hooves, in the heavy foliage and patches of snow, but she didn’t want to get lost. She returned to the
road and continued to walk along, the blood pounding in her head and heavily in her chest. She remembered
her doctor reminded her that she suffered from high blood pressure; that she was morbidly obese and needed to
lose an unfathomable amount of body weight; that she needed to change her diet and reduce her cholesterol
before she suffered another heart attack. When she spotted the moose again, she became so excited her diseased
heart tortured her with pain. Ever so silently she popped a nitroglycerine tablet from her medication bottle
while she gently balanced her .308 rifle between her hands and knees. The medication gently popped and fizzed
underneath her tongue. She allowed the effects of the nitroglycerin to work on her, on the diseased arteries of
her overexerted and overexcited heart. After a few suspenseful minutes transpired, she caught a glimpse of a
patch of brown. She drew the iron sights of her Remington pump action .308 on the shifting patches of grey
rustling in the twigs and branches of spruce and pine trees—she was unknowingly aiming her rifle muzzle at
Char. She pulled the trigger and felt the recoil pad slam against her down-filled shoulder. Hearing a stirring in
the bushes, she figured that certainly she had caught her game. For good measure, she shot another bullet into
the bushes. She didn't want to find herself in the path of a charging bull moose.
Pushing through the thick grass and brush, Char emerged from the bushes with her plastic bottle of
Diet Coke, her rifle, and the snowshoe hare she had shot. With cold, steely eyes, she stared her straight in the
face—Char, owner, and manager of the Northwest Grocer, now shuttered, formerly Amelia’s chief competitor
for sixty miles, her sole rival in the cutthroat food retailing business in town. The muzzle of her rifle rested
against the blood-stained cloth of her plaid wool coat. Her face exuded a healthy natural glow and her eyes
eerily froze into a stare locked on Amelia. Char drank from the plastic bottle of Diet Coke, into which she had
poured a triple shot of spiced dark rum. Amelia was surprised to see her drinking, and she knew she was
drinking because she could smell the spiced rum. Amelia was surprised; she never knew Char to be a drinker.
Shauna told her that employees at Char’s store, particularly her female cashiers became concerned about her.
They noticed the former teetotaler had started drinking. They smelled the alcohol on Char’s breath, and
noticed the erratic behavior of the boss they always knew to abstain from alcohol. For her part, Char now found
that spiced rum and a sublingual Ativan helped her cope with anxiety after first Antin and then her father died.
“Char, I’m sorry to hear about your father.”
“He was old and sick and he wanted to die.” Char took a sip of her spiced rum and Diet Coke. “People
die.” Char sipped her Diet Coke again; her drinking struck Amelia as some sort of tic or mannerism. Amelia
didn’t ever remember her drinking alcoholic beverages before and could barely conceal her disapproval. Char
waved the plastic bottle of rum-and-Diet-Coke, as if offering a drink. “Everybody told me he was a great man,
a war hero—he was an effing bomber pilot—he killed civilians. He couldn’t shake the conviction, couldn’t live
with killing civilians, so you never heard him bragging. He started as a bush pilot when he was a teenager, but
after the war he was suddenly afraid to fly and couldn’t pilot planes. Christ, he dumped tons of bombs on
German cities and innocent people. You call that a hero?”
“Yes,” Amelia said. “Plenty of local boys served in bombers during the war.”
“He told me the night they bombed Dresden was the most incredible and amazing thing he ever saw in
his life—this great baroque city lit up by a hurricane of fire. I could never understand how my father, this kid
from Northwestern Ontario, landed in the cockpit of a Lancaster dropping tons of bombs in a huge formation
of RAF planes, creating a firestorm in Germany. I could never understand how a teenager, a bush pilot, who
wound up flying bombers in the world’s biggest war could go back to a normal life.”
“That’s why he was a grocer in a small northern town. No better way to lead a quiet productive life than
in your hometown.” Char set the plastic bottle of rum and Diet Coke on a rock and swung the long bloody
carcass of the rabbit over her shoulder. She appeared intoxicated, and Amelia realized this was the longest
conversation they transacted in a few decades, and she needed to tread carefully. “I’m sorry about the store.”
Char lifted her rifle in anger. “That’s none of your business.”
“I might be still interested in buying the building,” Amelia said spontaneously.
“You have nerve.” Char poked the air with her rifle.
Earlier, during pillow talk, Shauna told her if Char inherited the bulk of her father’s estate, she would
have the liquidity to stay in the grocery business. Her financial losses would extend deeper over the long term,
though. She might have already burned through her inheritance trying to keep the store afloat; she simply
couldn’t compete with the big box stores and discounters in the neighboring town, where local residents drove
every weekend.
“Do you need money?” Amelia asked.
Char laughed a long, heckling laugh. “Are you my sugar momma? You really do have a lot of nerve.”
Her chest pains were causing her distraction. “You didn’t show up at the Chamber of Commerce or the
Rotary Club meeting.”
“What’s it to you? I have obligations.”
Char held up the bloody snowshoe hare, decapitated by the mushroom bullets shot from her high-
powered rifle, and admired the small game as it dangled from her hand. The rabbit’s raw bloody carcass stained
the side of her plaid coat. Amelia couldn’t help noticing she wasn’t wearing anything like her own blaze orange
vest and toque, so she would be visible to fellow hunters with weapons.
“I was worried the bullet that I just fired…,” Amelia said, her voice trailing off. Amelia was filled with
remorse and contrition, but Char glared and then smiled when she saw her fear. Amelia also saw that age only
made Char more alluring. Despite her late age onset drinking, she managed to stay fit and strong. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
During the long awkward pause, her vintage bolt action Canadian Army rifle rested against her thigh
with her thin bony finger, in a thick wedding band, wrapped around the trigger. Christ, Amelia rationalized, if
she hadn't fired first she might have become game herself. Although she feared she would fire a bullet in
retaliation, Amelia decided she would simply try to walk away, lest the unfortunate encounter turn into a
confrontation. Amelia turned and left the tall woman standing at the side of the muddy road in the tall dead
grass. She quickly strolled along the roadway towards Char’s red Jeep. As she, short of breath, puffing, sweating,
strode down the logging road, past a huge uprooted tree stump, in the direction of the red Jeep, Char raised her
rifle. Amelia pretended she didn’t hear the click of Char’s bolt action rifle, but as she neared her Jeep, a bullet
whizzed over her head. Amelia took cover behind the Jeep, which irked and aggravated Char to no end. Raw
with emotion, overcome with anger, she shouted at her incoherently. When Amelia raised her head above the
hood and engine compartment, she saw her fierce expression. She realized there was no quelling or assuaging
her rage.
"I'm going to give you a dose of your own medicine!" Char said.
Amelia emerged from behind the Jeep. “Char, you’ve been grieving your loss, you’re under stress, you’ve
been drinking—please calm down.”
Char pointed the rifle at Amelia, who again retreated to the cover of the Jeep. “Stand back—away from
my jeep!”
Couldn't she understand she fired in error, Amelia said, in the excitement of the moment, in her
enthusiasm for hunting moose? If she understood, the point seemed moot now; Char was preoccupied with
protecting the territorial imperative of her sturdy vintage Jeep. Amelia turned around and saw her shining
smooth skin, her long thick dark hair, and her pinched, stressed expression as she raised her rifle. Char quickly
swung and aimed her rifle around and fired. With the sharp cracking retort of her rifle, a bullet whizzed above
her head again. Gripping the rifle with shaking hands, she pointed the muzzle to some indeterminate point
above her head. Amelia thought the most prudent move at this point was to simply flee. Every time, she tried to
take shelter behind her Jeep, she made threatening motions and ordered her to move away or step from her
Jeep, as if she intended to steal or vandalize her rugged off-road vehicle. Amelia decided she would try to make
a run for her own pickup truck further down the logging road but, with her diseased heart and sclerotic coronary
arteries, she wasn’t confident in her own ability to hurry. She feared, expected, Char would shoot her. Whether
her bullets found their mark, or whether she would aim to kill her was another of her wonders. But she also
feared Char, in a self-destructive mood, wanted Amelia to shoot her. Amelia remembered back to the days
when they played catch. Later, when Amelia revealed a few details of their youthful relationship to Shauna, she
told her she was a numbskull. Of course, Char nurtured a crush for her and wanted to be her girlfriend, but she
didn’t reciprocate. While Char might have wanted Amelia to be her girlfriend, it was easier for her, even then,
to have her Playboy and Playgirl magazines. Also, even as a girl she was an avid outdoorsman, hunting with a
pellet rifle and fishing winter, spring, and fall.
Now Amelia crouched on the roadside, concealing herself, protecting her body behind Char’s Jeep,
crouching to avoid her potshots, near the bushes alongside the logging road.
“Are you going to shoot me, because, if you are, I’m ready to defend myself, I’m ready to die.”
“Char, I’m sorry about your store.”
Ravens wheeled and flew overhead – Char figured someone had shot a moose and its carcass lay nearby,
which was why she had stepped into the bushes to investigate. Amelia decided it was too dangerous to stay and
safer to leave; besides, she wasn’t in the mood for waiting for Char to calm down, and she didn’t like being held
hostage. She stepped from behind the Jeep.
“Stand back from the Jeep!” Char pointed her rifle at her. Standing in the dried mud of tire treads, Char
aimed her rifle and fired. Reflexively Amelia pointed and aimed her gun in a combination of raw emotion,
retaliation, and self-defense. When she fired again, Amelia reacted instinctively and impulsively. In return,
Amelia pulled the trigger on her own rifle, whose chamber she had left loaded, with the safety set to fire, after
she saw the moose earlier. Char collapsed in the deep ruts of the logging road. When she realized Char became
a casualty of her shot, Amelia walked over to where she lay on the ground, her chest heaving, gasping. The
bullet ripped through the bones and soft tissues of her chest, leaving a bloody wound in the middle of her torso.
Char, gasping, struggling to breathe, barely managed to force the words beyond her bloody lips and mouth.
“I got you, motherfucker.” Blood dripped down her aquiline chin. “Now leave me alone to die in peace.”
Knowing there was no way she could survive, no way first responders, paramedics, could arrive in time,
no way she could help, Amelia watched her die. It was suicide, like suicide by cop, she kept telling herself. Char
wanted to die and thought Amelia would be the perfect means to fulfil her end by euthanasia. Amelia was
overcome by powerful emotion and a sense of urgency, as well as the need to act defensively, self-protectively.
Then she felt a fear and a need to evacuate her bowels and bladder and empty her stomach in the aftermath of
her own rash action and recklessness. She could hear a voice in her head explaining to a lawyer she had merely
taken extreme measures as an act of self-defense. She vomited into some bushes.
Amelia popped another nitroglycerine tablet under her tongue and broke into a middle-aged trot. She
walked as fast as her heavy weight and lack of fitness would allow. After several false starts, she gunned the
engine of the four-wheel drive pickup truck, with which she sometimes ordered the stockboys to make home
deliveries of groceries to a few select, high-paying customers. She drove several kilometers through the
meandering network of logging roads until she finally reached the secondary highway. November's snow had
turned to frozen rain that pelted the windshield.
Instead of driving towards town, she turned east on the highway, and drove to the bend in the hardtop
and gravel roadway to the single lane bridge over Sturgeon River. She stopped her pickup truck in the middle of
the bridge and checked vigilantly around her, up and down the length of the highway on both sides, along the
lengths of the river to their bends. She grabbed her rifle from the box of her pickup truck and threw it over the
guardrail of the one lane bridge into Sturgeon River. Instead of a splashing in the water, she heard the rifle
clatter on cement. When she looked down at the river, she saw the rifle resting on the cement abutment of the
bridge. She drove her truck to the top of the trail and clambered down the embankment to the river shore
beneath the bridge. She tried wading into the water, but she realized the water was too cold and she would
suffer hypothermia or give herself a heart attack from the cold water, if she tried swimming. She looked up to
the top of the bridge and remembered how her friends would dive from the bridge during summers. A friend
had even doused his coat in gasoline, lit it, and dove into the water. Then she remembered her .22 caliber rifle.
She went to her trunk, took the rifle from its case behind the seat, and took potshots at the laminated walnut
stock of the high-powered rifle, until a bullet hit the pump-action rifle and managed to knock it off the bridge
support into the water. She glanced around the river and the highway and the bridge, but there was still no late
season boaters, anglers, or motorists or pedestrians around and she tossed the .22 rifle into the river as well. She
figured this would be her last season hunting.
She went through two nitroglycerine tablets on the drive along Highway 642 back to town, passing a
few rural houses, skidding several times, almost landing her truck in the swamp or ditches at the side of the
road, as she sped recklessly, although she repeatedly told herself not to panic and to calm down. She drove by a
few trucks along the whole length of the highway, noticing a few small game and moose hunters in blaze
orange. Business as usual, she muttered, scanning the radio channels, and almost lurching off the road as she
listened to her Food Pantry commercial and jingle on the radio station from Dryden. As she drove underneath a
railroad underpass, she decided she would skip supper with Shauna, the woman less than half her age with
whom she had taken to breaking bread occasionally. Instead, she stopped at a gas station and hotel and
convenience store. She bought a Playboy magazine from the magazine stand, and at the self-serve station she
topped her gas tank for twenty dollars.
Amelia checked into the motel and called Shauna, telling her she had an emergency business meeting in
Dryden, sixty miles away. Over the telephone, she reassured her everything was all right. She reassured her they
would very soon take that trip to the Azores, her parents’ homeland—a vacation she had promised her for the
past several months. After she bought some shampoo and hand soap from the confectionery, she sat in the
warm tub lost in thought and remorse for over an hour before she showered. She went into the bar attached to
the motel, her chest shuddering from the disco music. She popped another nitroglycerine tablet, and ordered a
straight double rye, which she, a teetotaler, gulped as quickly as she would cod liver oil. Her eyes watered as the
heaviness in her chest persisted. She thought she was having a heart attack, albeit a minor heart attack, which
would be her third minor heart attack. She told herself to relax and ordered another shot of rye, which she
drank quickly, even though she usually liked to sip and savor rich food and drink. Soon the pounding stopped in
her forehead and she felt a heaviness in her chest and she wrapped her arms around her large breasts. The pain
was not in her breasts, but radiated from the middle of her chest. She paid her bar tab, with a generous tip,
stumbled back to her motel room, and napped for a few hours in her motel bed.
Then she drove through the night and snow, her spirits lifted by her plans for a visit to her parents'
homeland in Azores, and the vision of escape, a jumbo jet streaking down a long wide runway and taking off
into the gleaming sunset.
Several days later, she gave Shauna the airline tickets to Thunder Bay, Toronto, and Sao Miguel,
Azores, which she bought from the local travel agency, where she heard more gossip from another former
classmate and fellow business owner, her travel agent, Jess. Jess asked her didn’t she think it shocking Char was
reported missing. That same might Shauna heard from a former Northwest Grocer employee, Jess’ daughter,
who went to work for Food Pantry, Char was missing. After she packed their luggage, she settled down in bed
besides Amelia. Shauna told her the night she graduated from high school she got drunk at her graduation after
party with classmates and friends drinking and skinny dipping on the sandy beach at Abram Lake Park. At
midnight they all stripped off their clothes and swimsuits and went swimming along the sandbar. Beneath the
clear starry night sky, beside a campfire, she had sex with three classmates from her graduating class, her
cheerleading squad classmate, her curling team classmate, and her home economics classmate, who played
goaltender on the high school hockey team. She tried to reassure her the goaltender, despite his muscles and
massive build, was effeminate and gay. Still, she had no regrets and enjoyed the experience and remembered the
fling fondly. She belched loudly and proudly—she could burp incredibly loud and often showed off with her
incredible eructations. Then she closed her eyes and slept soundly. While she snored, Amelia mused she had no
compunctions about telling her about her partying and one-night stands and her sexual peccadilloes because she
knew Amelia was practically and emotionally indifferent to her personal intimate history. Her tales of sexual
escapades left her partially mystified and bemused. She felt impartial to her personal proclivities—she truly
didn’t care, as long as she kept the accounting books kosher and accurate so the revenue agency didn’t ask
probing questions and send auditors to the store.
Amelia read her Playboy magazine and remembered decades ago what had happened the night before
Char had thrown the fastball that injured her groin, the incredibly fast and accurate pitch she made around the
same time she stopped inviting her to her house. Shauna’s snoring left her restless, frustrated, and struggling to
sleep.
Days later, Amelia boarded the 737 jet with Shauna at Pearson International Airport. The passenger jet
roared and streaked down the long wide runway of Pearson International Airport and took off into the
mournful pastel sunset above the millions of lights illuminating sprawling Toronto. Later that night, while the
plane soared over the north Atlantic, Amelia grew frightened at the sight of the endless waves of the foreboding
dark ocean thousands of feet below. She gloomily appraised the crowded jetliner interior, the crying babies, the
dullness of her senses in the pressurized cabins, the Portuguese expats returning to their homeland for the first
time in years, the excited tourists, and sensed impending doom. She feared catastrophe, an American Navy
warship mistakenly launching a surface-to-air missile at the jetliner, a crash or ocean ditching of the passenger
jet when its engines failed, or fuel was exhausted from a leak, and she grew panicky. Worried, Shauna
commented Amelia was turning a bluish hue, while she sipped the rye and ginger ale the flight attendant gave
her, after she wrote down her recipe for blueberry pie on a flight manual. The pain in Amelia’s chest grew so
severe she blacked out. When she regained consciousness, she had a translucent oxygen mask over her face.
Shauna was sobbing, trembling, in a panic, as a flight attendant held her to comfort her, and muttered smooth
words to sooth and console her in a time of distress. Another flight attendant stood over Amelia with the
paddles of a portable automated external defibrillator.
“She’s gone,” Amelia said spontaneously.
“You’re going to be all right,” the flight attendant said.
Panicky, she pulled away the mouthpiece and oxygen mask from her face, but the flight attendant
crouched over her, covering the parts of her exposed breasts with a blanket, as she bent to adjust the oxygen
mask over her mouth and nose. The flight attendant stood above and astride her body, with a confident, assured
poise and strong pose. She seemed to relish the moment, as the rows of passengers leaned forward and looked
back to glance at the flight attendant standing above the middle-aged passenger, lying on the aisle. She held the
paddles of the defibrillator against her firm smooth thighs. As Amelia looked up in a daze and a haze, she
couldn’t help noticing her strong bare pale legs, and her fit body. She tried to reassure her as she checked her
pulse and blood pressure on the medical instrument attached to the defibrillator.
“She’s dead,” Amelia said.
“We all die,” the flight attendant said, “but you’re going to be all right.”
Jon Riccio
The Imp Sitting on My Shoulder Points Out This Poem’s Last Word Means
to Try
Heebie-jeebies has asked that you not lump it with abstractions. Goosebumps
photograph. Like a KISS no makeup moment, we learn Merciful is Marci
Fulcrum, based on the pension check. She supplements by tutoring math.
Inevitably, music history class veers to the castrato topic. I proffer up
advancements in falsetto, the twist tie to disco’s Hefty Bag. The Bee Gees
preened heebie-jeebies on vocalists who couldn’t sing worth a week’s pay past
a polyester mill. The butterfly collar, what happens when chest hair essays.
Venetian Ladders
The triage lights say “from now on, we’re cinnamon in lieu of red. That way,
patients’ll think sugar versus life or death.” “We made slow down chartreuse,”
chimes the traffic light. “I shoot periwinkle,” the flare gun declares. “It’s like
aquamarine’s baby brother.” The tow truck switches to avocado flashers.
“Guacamole Fenders was my gym-class nickname,” it admits. “Did your phys ed
spring for titanium badminton nets too?” “No, but our conditioning room was a
Shake Weight and a Roman Chair,” texts the firetruck, which is why Italycolors
herald the hose.
The Cantos’ Meow
The camera adds eight Ezra Pounds. We podcast instead, then head to
Alchemists’ Anonymous. I wish toil was trajectory-partial, wish tourmaline
refilled cocktails without snifter flint. One day, you’re the gemologist’s pouch,
everystone the next. Non-platinum outcomes, morsels more so. If Ezra’d been
born fifty years later, he’d middle age via Soloflex spree. That, tabbies, is
suppositional gingerhood.
Aaron Spelling
Cobbled together loses its stoic-ness after the thirtieth letter of interest. I smell
like an adjunct who teaches at two colleges, but here’s comfort: Dynasty’s Sammy
Jo and TJ Hooker’s Stacy were the same starlet. Hire me, and you’ve jobbed the
Heather Locklear of academe.
Parliament
Two tapiocas short of a pudding caucus, Reese cuts the lunchroom’s arts and
caftans fund, ascots DIY’d out-of-pocket. That Reese, he’s moodier than twin
Gerhardts, their library a pretend hospital, almanac’s bivouac letting slip the
erotica fines that stretch from Toronto to Tacoma. The rosary on a record player
chipmunks God at parable speed.
Joshua Martin
Graphic watershed quadrant
WOODcut
chiseled the end of the century
, improved upon
copper arms
, hanging fruitful
navigational TooLs.
Fragile the course of a cause

giving credit to intermediate sap
[coarse ALONG a
LaP],
immediate gesture
reminiscent of an AnCieNt MaP
, used but NeVeR alone at NooN.
Aggressive geometry (spirit of the deal)
Academy of permanent resources

race for desire morbid as an itsy bitsy slingshot
:
neighborhood WiNe
, cheesy , leased out
for summer cottage ---
born of tomorrow’s
gum backside stable.
Hounding a DooR,
jammed , slammed ,
stool on offense ---
dialed memorial
telephone
(NuMbeR / smite / jukeBOX).
Complaints,pizza,organic,approachable
Online supply ---
nephew nurses a NuN.
Omnivorous handbook
, disease killed comprehensive
conflict of AccOrD
, sisters & partners
in crimewave.
Companion invented romantic human editing

and high COST ethical DEBATE power
, missed perspective
& referential pathways.
Go moaning if it fills a binding law
Temporal frameworks
, problem of inscrutable context.
Internal trajectory of discursive

probability [?]
Say scaffolding
in a limber photosynthesis.
Mushroom varieties
as facets of story worlds
build to paint compass.
Chapter <BREAK
> ! (development
of classical
connotations
, confined primary
paradigm , a plumbing
, less mode
foregrounded leech
DeepLY improbable)> A
random quality
by the end
implausible:
HURRAH!
Reported tarantula
Plunging imbues neckline

anti-proportional
material verbal
uncertain
methodological pictorial
framing
device fist
perfected century
spoons. Laminated
requirements a responsible
spasm
prefigured ethical tool
used to bludgeon
, safety last.
As commentaries
always cursed
, beneath windswept
intestinal diameter,
porridge copies language
revealing adjustments
not yet administered.
Romanticism
showers nutshell
train outlined
digital benchmark
packing material
consumption.
declining vigor
tract makes superficial detail

after ForeHeaD, a monography
startling &
slow.
hormones match bicycle whEEls

an objective knucklewalk boring
BlaTheR! BlaTheR! BlaTheR!
Where fruit strays BaskeTs graze

sharp BOUTS canopy hypothesis
blossom ProximitY rotatable CliMbing
lost mechanisms benefit TuBeS
Send Card! Embryo

cavity! Stark
scram publicity layer.
Ready escaping gums
Slant rhyme /
free gesture
, suds hanging
dozens
/ , / . Religious
hurricanes : :
FOREST or
FORECAST ???
Space station
envoy scrubs
instrumental dishes
piled up tongues in
a tattoo carnival.
Moonlight
, shake wearied
drilling dread
snarling
INSECT
grouse
, . Freezing wall
chills spine
forgotten
SITcom.
Resist dome
gallows dance
soupy porch
fair resolution
..........
Limbo / Fire /
Plague / Converge /
.
Julia Nunnally Duncan
In Winter
In winter,
the icy air and falling snow
drive me inside my home
to hide in the warmth
of a wood fire's embrace,
soft lamplight encasing me
in its glow.
A book for company,
I seek comfort in my solitude,
retreating from the hard months
of planting and growing
and harvesting and preserving
my garden's bounty.
Winter for me
is freedom and a patient wait
for the spring to bring back labor
that the earth requires.
In winter,
I find solace and a quieter mind—
a stillness
and time of rest and renewal.
Tabloids
The woman,
whom I had known years before,
accosted me in the grocery store
when she noticed the tabloids
I carried to the checkout lane.
They were for my mother,
who liked reading about the Royal Family
and Hollywood celebrities
and enjoyed working the puzzles inside;
and I loved buying them for her—
a Friday treat
that she looked forward to all week.
The woman said, appalled,
“I can't believe you read that trash!
I’m disappointed in you.”
(I had been her English teacher—
someone who, I guess,
wasn’t supposed to read something so low.)
Though her criticism was flung at me,
I sensed an insult to my mother’s dignity
and told the woman she should read the tabloids, too,
and learn something she didn’t know.
I burst her bubble that day in the grocery store,
dashing any illusions she had about me.
But I didn’t want her respect anymore.
My Brother's Garden
How quickly grass covered the plot

where my brother's garden grew,
one he nurtured caringly.
He shared with me some of his bounty—
messes of Blue Lake bush beans,
golden ears of Kandy Korn,
bags of Clemson Spineless okra;
cabbages, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers—
the harvest of his hard work.
In his final garden,
he grew only a few tomatoes.
I should have known then
that something was wrong.
Now that he is gone,
I see the grassy field and remember him
laboring in the sun:
tilling, hoeing, and lifting his baseball cap
to wipe the sweat from his brow,
resting a moment to survey his work,
knowing he had done it well.
Hometown
Near the end of Lent,

the minister needed something to sustain him,
so he went back to his hometown
to visit the old streets and haunts of his boyhood.
He stood at the bank where his mother had worked
and looked through the front window;
and as if the past appeared again,
he saw his mother motion him in
to give him a private tour.
He pondered that when she died—
too soon—
his father was left to raise him then.
He found the movie theater,
one his father had run for years,
and reflected upon the time he spent
sitting in its darkness.
When he came to his childhood home,
he remembered his father's whistle—
a sound as distinct as his name—
that called him in for the evening.
During his return to Shelby,
he realized that things weren't the same:
the stores had changed,
loved ones were gone,
and new people lived in his family’s home.
Yet somehow to be there allowed him to see
the light of Easter in the dusk of Lent.
All that he had known before—
beckoned back in his memory—
gave him the strength to carry on.
L. Sydney Abel
Dark Mind
Rooted in the Unconscious
Wane Barecell was an Unreasonable by profession or so Wake Elmsjar would say when he got the chance,
which just happened to be every day.

“You’re unwanted,” said Wake, “don’t you forget it. You have grandiose delusions.”
“You’re one to talk,” replied Wane, in a mocking manner, “and that unwanted, raggedly-shawled thing
died at seven days old.”
“I’m not dead!” cried Wake, shutting down for the day.
The room was cavernous. Darkness oozed from the walls, the ceiling, and the floor.
The next day:
As it often did, a spark lit distance in starlight.
Wane played the game. His instruction to Wake was confident, “I’m not talking today. I’m busy. I’m
being creative.”
In your head you can be anything, or nothing. Today be somebody, for tomorrow you may be nobody.
Lifted from my first book of emotive words ‘Tongue is a Fire’

The Disposal of Wake Elmsjar
Some want to know the meaning of life; some just question everything. Others only question their
existence–as deep as that seems, it’s many lonely voices calling from the heart.
“Wake Elmsjar, I’m not your friend. Leave me alone. Go away. I can think for myself. I don’t need you
anymore. Please go,” Wane Barecell supposedly said. He might have imagined what he said. But anyway, Wake
heard it.
“So you want to die?” asked Wake, waiting in the grey matter.
Wane gave his confession, “It’s not so hard, I’ve done it before.”
“When?” pried Wake, rifling through dark memories.
“You think I’m talking physically.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No. My youth died. My pride died. My status died.” This overthinking is wearing me down. I need to
sleep this world away.
“Your mind is still young, look how childish you act at times. Pride is a stupid emotion, which should be
buried. Wait, what status are you talking about?”
“Being a son, a brother, a husband, a father.”
“What about being a friend?”
“Friendship sucks.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Maybe I am, but I’ve tried to be a friend and whatever I do isn’t good enough.”
“Remember, you’re you. You’re made this way. You’re many things.”
“That’s right. I’m many things, and, yet, I still want death.”
“Then do it,” interrupted Wake, “and get out of my head.”
“Your head?” Wane quizzed. “You… you-self-importance… leave… go. Go on, get out. I’ll get the spade
and I’ll bury you.”
In the garden… by the moon’s light…
Dig… dig… dig. Dig some more.
Way down in the earth was a lonely hole.
“Goodnight non-friend. Pleasant dreams,” said Wane, spitting into the depths.
“You’re an Unreasonable by profession,” called Wake, from his dark hole, “you have grandiose delusions.”
Wane began shovelling the earth back into the hole.
Wake’s voice was slowly being stifled, “Grandiose delusions … delusions… delusions… delusions… delusions…”
All that shovelling had made Wane exhausted. I need some sleep for myself now… I’m tired of my
percentages dying… how much of me is left?

The return of Wake Elmsjar
The night was as secretive as the grave. The bedroom was filled with shadows discussing the living. Wane
Barecell listened intently. Private conversations were being transmitted, but living ears were the wrong receiver.
Within the grey matter, restless in thought, reclined the returned.
“Are you awake?” the restive asked. “To answer would be foolish, but not to answer would make you
foolisher than I am.”
“Your grammar is appalling. When did you get back?” asked Wane.
“Just now. It took a long time to claw my way out of that dark hole you placed me in.”
“I wanted rid of you, for good.”

“You’re an Unreasonable by profession. You can’t free yourself from yourself, that’s impossible,” stated
Wake.
Shadows stopped their chitter chatter. All heads turned towards the one watching from behind the bed
sheets.
Wane thought, If I find someone who’s lost their mind, then I could give them you. You’d like that wouldn’t you?
We’d both be free to think for ourselves.
“You’re such an idiot,” responded Wake. I already told you ‘you can’t free yourself from yourself, that’s
impossible’.”
“You’re right. I know it’s impossible, but thinking about it keeps me sane,” said Wane, with a smile that
said exactly what he wrestles with.
Shadows returned to their conversations. Wane tuned in momentarily and heard one say “Pity the lunatic
who doesn’t know he’s insane.”
“He’s not a lunatic. He just battles with someone he used to be. He suffers grandiose delusions.”
“Yes, he believes he has a special relationship with supernatural entities,” commented another shadow.
“But haven’t those non-souled creatures from the underworld decided he is no longer sought?” asked a
different shadow, joining the conversation. “I was told by the ghost of a nun, as told by her fellow sister, as told
by the sister’s great-grandfather, that he would always fight them and…”
Hertz shifted to ear-splitting. In the silence of night whistled a pitch of annoyance that would last for
hours or until sleep deadened everything conscious, allowing dreams of the suggestive kind.
Tell Me Again
Identity is key to happiness.
“You were there… at the beginning. You absorbed her emotions. You heard and felt it all. Tell me again
how I was made?” asked Wane Barecell.
“You know. I’ve told you many times,” replied Wake Elmsjar.
“Please, tell me again all you know.”

Wake settled down in the grey matter. “Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. “A Greased-Rocker bribed
a woman’s three kids with sweets, so that they’d be out of the way while the grownups played.
“The woman who liked men and money, a so-called looker, grabbed her stud and took him upstairs for a
bed-shaking-session.
“Greased-Rocker rides the looker and adds more sugar…”
“You’re spoiling it,” argued Wane.
Wake conceded. “Okay, I’ll tell it the romantic way.”
“Good, and be pleasant.”
Wake began the pleasing version. “An attractive woman was dated by a good-looking man who rode a motorbike.
“He brought sweets for his love’s three children. As the children played outdoors, the adults made
romantic love in the bedroom.
“The man’s seed swam inside the woman, seeking its goal. The man kissed goodbye and left. The woman
took care of her children.
“What followed was the conception of life, Wake Elmsjar was being forged in the same womb as his
sisters and brother.
“Time and growth wait for no woman. I came into this world like my siblings before me.
“But my time was not to be. Advice was that I be taken away and given to someone else. I was to be known
as Wake for six days only. You, Wane, my friend, were born in another mother’s arms. I’m not physically dead,
because you are me, as I am you, we are both.

“Would you like me to continue the not-so-pleasing version, were the Greased-Rocker quickly transforms
into a magician and disappears up his own arse?”
“No… I don’t need reminding of the rough truth. I know all that followed after day six. You died, I lived.
It’s as simple as that,” answered Wane.
“Metaphorically speaking, that’s right,” conceded Wake. “I’m going away now. I may be gone for good.”
“I buried you and you came back. You can’t keep away. I just have to live with knowing that,” said Wane. “You’re
right about the magician though. He did disappear, and it might as well be the way you said it.”
A Clerical Error To Confuse
Wake Elmsjar was disordered within the grey matter. In muddled thought, far-flung from Wane Barecell’s
conscious, he wrestled.
Dear supreme being of all creation, please hear my plea. I’m tired of looking through eyes that were once
my own. I hear all his thoughts. I see all his memories. I’m sick of punishing him for being me. Wait… he’s not
me, is he? Is it possible that we have different souls?
It’s all too confusing. I dream of my six days and what might have followed, if things were different. Why
did you need to bring him into existence?

Go on, say it. It’s all part of the bigger picture. It’s all got meaning. Have you ever considered you’re wrong? No,
I bet you haven’t.
It’s so unfair. Why did you do this to me? I want a conversation with the one who made me, from whom
I grew. I need to feel love, so I can forgive.
Can I then be reborn? Are you there? Are you even listening? Answer me!
Gone was the urgency to confront observation. Gone was any motivation. Nothingness was creeping into
feeling.
Down a long corridor, flanked by countless rooms, headed two carers. The room they’d been sent to shone in
celestial light. A baby's soul cried. Observed was a new presence.
“I hate it when a child dies,” confessed Rachel.
Daniel looked at his notes. “Mmm… it seems there’s been a clerical error.”
“Does that mean the soul returns to its body?” said Rachel, her face hovering above a now silent, observing
personality.
“No. The child's body received a new soul, decades ago, as ordained. Unfortunately this soul never came
to us when it was planned to.”
“You’re telling me it remained in the body, alongside a new soul?”
“Yes.”
“That’s dreadful. Someone’s head should roll, figuratively.”

“It’s not for us to judge the ways of creation. It’s for us to deal with only the souls we receive, and take
them to the appropriate teachers. This soul doesn’t need judgement, for it’s done no wrong, it needs tutoring.”
“Methodical to the last,” quipped Rachel.
Daniel, not out of character, replied with assurance, “This soul will remember nothing more than its first
six days upon the Earth. Take heart in knowing that.”
“I will. But until I see the whole picture, I’ll question what I don’t understand.”
“Just make sure you don’t interrogate those that can do you destruction.”
“You mean they could send me to the other place for disagreeing with the plan?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Some creators may not want you questioning their design. They could, if
feeling the need to, make it so you never existed in any form.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“No, not really.”
Wane Barecell felt unusually light headed. It was as if a weight had floated from his mind, and rose to an indefinite
height never to fall. He couldn’t describe it, but felt he knew everything, and nothing.
“I’m going to be busy. I’m going to be creative.”
In your head you can be anything, or nothing. Today be somebody, for tomorrow you may be nobody.
All it takes is a prayer for religion to be real.

Lohren Green
Present Now
It’s early morning and Jackson is refreshed in the shower: a running free fall, rush and oasis in the dry, quotidian
routine that habitually follows. Here he is in the flow, a unique individual inside what is, as part of what is,
currently considering the thought that everything gives and receives itself through time. “I am this, to me,” he
observes, stepping out and seeing his reflection in the mirror. He towels himself dry before applying calcium-
enriched pastes to teeth, scents to armpits, softeners to skin, and then, standing in front of his wardrobe of
clothes, putting together his ensemble: blue-jean pants paired with a pullover drawn atop an undershirt. His
breakfast, sundering the night’s going without, consists of toasted bread, and two liquids in two glasses: a fruit
juice in one, caffeinated coffee in the other. And today¾ as on other days when he has appetitite for more ¾
cereal. Despite the selfsameness of the meal, there are always subtle nuances of distinction in it: the doneness of
the toast, the sweetness of the nectar, the craft of the brew.
At the threshold he feels the change from indoor to outdoor air as he bolts his lock and walks with paced steps
through his gateway to the car sitting in park at the curb. The instant the car starts the news is informing him:
China’s government, exerting its authority to control through regulation, has barred use of the word
“censorship.” Climate change is altering weather patterns. The supreme court is hosting oral hearings on
binding contracts. An obscure philosopher speculates on the chances that everything is a digital simulation.
There’s high pressure over the Rocky Mountains.
And so attuned to the regional radio broadcast, Jackson is carried in his vehicle to another place: Cocoda where
he is a debugger of the quality assurance software that the company sells to software professionals. One would
think that with such a team of experts working at their expertise, there would be no room for gaps in the code,
but the dynamics of development always generate something new. A cynic looks down on bugs as pesty bothers
born of errors bred by flaws. Whereas an optimist sees an excess that is something more, and, drawing us
forward through analogy to a more positive picture, might express it thus: it is like a chorus singing a rondo in
an amphitheater with an echo, every moment an abundance spilling forth to extend the present to another.
Jackson always means what he says, and is looked upon with high regard for speaking a mantra that is both
simple and oft repeated, by himself and by others: “it works, or it doesn’t.” The functional selfsameness of this
his mantra’s response to every practical matter reinforced the team’s collective stance on his group standing. He
repeated it again and again, as his father Jack had also frequently done before him, yet it always meant
something a little bit different depending on the surrounding situation and his vocal intonation.
II
Jackson loved another named Amanda. He was contrary to the opinion that opposites attract, and his own
attraction to her held closely to this point. Their meeting was felicitous, ordinary and unforeseen: the happy
occasion of chance at a pedestrian intersection. No, they did not bump into one another. He was too careful,
she too adept, for such a clumsy encounter. But approaching each other from a spaced distance they did
recognize in one another something they thought they knew ¾ and something they thought they would like to
know again. And so as they came face to face, thinking forwards and backwards about themselves vis-à-vis this
other, it crossed both their minds both to move on and go back. Some might think it could have gone either
way but in fact they both did both as the lights signaled change in the passing moment. They each went their
way that day, but as we’ve said they remarked on one another so that the next time they met each other they
found themselves together engaged in conversation and some months later leaving their separate apartments to
cohabitate in a condominium.
She created synthetics that had profusely productive properties generating abundance for the many who owned
them: the shareholders of a company ¾ a company that included the subsidiary she contributed to ¾ who
received some of their distributed value in the form of company shares and some in quarterly dividends. She had
in the past and after long study with a classically trained researcher made a substantial impact on the science of
materials through a medium capable of translating precise external impingements into meticolously retained
impressions. She left that behind as her trajectory then carried her into her current workstreams: evolving the
physics of fluid dynamics as applied to transient plasmas. It is a specialty that might be just a passing fancy of
hers as her musings shift from lasting material outcomes to the momentary experience of the journey ¾ and
there are constantly changing points of view being expressed all around her as to whether her improvisations
will spring new revenue streams for the enterprise endeavoring to adapt to changing times.
Jackson and Amanda text each other messages. Cryptic, on point, and without deviating into error, so they
avoid cliché (not their style) and flaw (either). For example, in one instance when she was simultaneously away
and in his thoughts, he corresponded to her: “There is a place you are inside our embrace.” That Friday she
typed “rendezvous repast” and so they met again at the same place they ate the week before. Their hunger grew
with appetizers, and then they had the main course together, family style, generously providing one another
with ample servings from large, shared plates of food. Though the meal merited dessert, and the two-tiered
double chocolate Genoese cake split twice by two layers of chocolate mousse appeared to both as a completely
fullfilling conclusion to lunch, they jointly discussed deferring ¾ whenever their waiter returned from his break
¾ the dessert to another day.
That night, in the dark, cushioned in the couch, they consummated the end of the week together, intertwined.
Then they slept there, dreaming fantastic occurrences as their closed eyes scanned imagined figments and their
bodies sometimes twitched in the quiet stillness of the passing time, the bed lying dormant a room away.
III
At the edge of the couch in the middle of that Saturday morning night he woke from sleep dislocated for a
reason that can’t be explained: it wasn’t the weekend, or the couch, or him. Now looked at in retrospect, one
wonders if it was what we think we feel when we do things like knock walls, garble articulations, forget
reminders, or bite our cheek: a string of local disruptions run through a greater, off-kilter order. Some say it’s
one’s stars, which literally doesn’t make sense, but could be true as a metaphor, or instead understood as a
straightforward case of entanglement with some disruly corner of our cosmos. Others see it as a random glitch
in fate’s reckoning. And then: what role a recalcitrant will, or fragmenting identity? Whatever the wherefore,
when Jackson woke again, late morning, though on in intention yet he felt off. Working steadily to shake it, he
ran a quick, straight jog through an urban park. He then veered from an errand to pause for tea in a café before
continuing back the way he came to the store whose shelves it turned out did not hold the ingredients he
needed. The plan no longer outlining what was to come, Jackson improvised a menu using recipes that he had
already made, returned to the shelves to gather the originally unforeseen provisions, paid with credit, and then
entered the outside again.
Finding his empty, partial-zero emissions vehicle in the packed lot, he clicked the key fob to unlock the auto
door, swung into his seat, and heard a 30 second ad capturing the freedom of a lifetime that’s to be found in a
river cruise. The host then recapped the news in an emotive (grim to gay) sequence: the right-to-lifer who had
bombed an abortion clinic and killed a nurse is given life in prison. The money in Argentina is worthless, and
the minimum wage in the US is not enough. A well-known writer is releasing his complete works, including his
uncollected stories, in four slim volumes. The season’s most anticipated movie turns out to be an unpredictable
tragicomedy that critics applaud. And, finally, a fun fact: the most common street name in the U.S. is Second
Street (presumably because First and Main split down the expected leader into two runners-up).
He backed out to head home, and passed by the Liberty Safes store that made present the memory of a long-
time acquaintance and ungenerous spendthrift from his past. There’s an anecdote about that man that would
make one with schadenfreude think justice is poetic: he exhausted his savings in the reckless purchase of a
masterfully designed safe that caught the fancy of carjackers and was stolen, with his car, from the orderly
striped parking lot through which, afterward, the rattled man meandered, slowly propelled by his flagging
adrenaline. Driving away Jackson arrived at the thought: “Sometimes people do things, and sometimes things
happen to people. The puzzle is the fit.” The freeway took him straight past the verdant Skylawn cemetery and
turned his distracted attention to the dead lives there: all the vital, varied vicissitudes of each now identically
filed in neat dirt rows of defunction. “What, of what they did, was actually done…” he entertained with
seriousness, “…and what undone?” he went on before suddenly slowing to a stop necessitated by an accident
ahead ¾ an accident that had caused, through a sequence of chance happenings compiled upon a passive driver,
her fatality.
That evening, now at home, the day still felt uncanny. Jackson was deep into preparations for the meal, but
while, for example, the box grater did smoothly grate, yet it didn’t feel right. He quit working so his mind could
engage the tool: a set of identical planes variously perforated to create four logics of unraveling, all aggressively
awaiting external inputs. Broken down in his thought it was a holistic form both solid and hollow. Constructive
and destructive. Functional and unnecessary. This inertly resonant thing brought to mind the artificial
intelligence that the engineers were starting to play with at work. Solid but hollow. Construtive and destructive.
Functional and unnecessary. Still nestled in his hand, the grater. Pondering this mundane implement in the
grand scheme of things, things felt, essentially, superfluous. And he himself, wasn’t he, if differently, the same?
In the mornings he regarded himself in the mirror, toasted his toast, and passed time securing the performance
of quality assurance software. It is true, yes, in his own eyes, he was often present in the moment and generally
content, without wants. But now he looked at this his ordinary state from an alien place. He rested to work and
worked to rest, and his significant other Amanda did the same vacuous thing. They consumed energy to expend
it, indeed even expended it to consume it, and everyone and every thing did as well in their own way, and would
do so ceaselessy until their end, each evolution an irrational logic of unraveling that accomplishes something and
means nothing. This present thought-space, he’s aware, is an isolating downer incompatible with the group’s
upcoming festivities.
IV
That descended night Amanda’s sister Carolyn was mixing cocktails for the party of couples: Amanda and
Jackson, Carolyn and Alice. Like her sister, Carolyn was productively adept, though in a different if distantly
related field: an art of collage that gathered materials, subjects and forms of varied affinities into pieces of
multivocal expression. Through their evolving yet contiguous traits, these artworks assembled an ouevre, the
parts of which were distributed through the living and dining rooms of overlapping circles of friends and family
to more distant acquaintances and kin, achieving through these placements the connections that propogated a
small measure of respected recognition through a loosely formed local community of three degrees of
separation.
Carolyn stirred the blend of rye whiskey with an herbal vermouth and spiced bitters. As she finished the
cocktails by placing into each first ice cubes and then a taut cherry drawn from ruby syrup in a wide-mouthed
jar, she connected the anticipated taste of the plump fruit to the thought of the dessert ahead that would also
conjoin sweetness with acidity in a pie. That pictured piece of pie connected next to a foreglimpsed montage of
moments flickering through her imagination: aged cheese wedges next to sea salt crackers, smiles subtly curled
by dry humor, rearranged seatings from kitchen island stools to living room couch to dining table chairs, and,
finally, now plated in dramatic presentation, that flaky crusted fruit pie ¾ topped by an elegant dollop of
whipped cream ¾ and bracketed by a thin crescent of orange sauce doubling the plate’s contour at the edge of
the composition.
Also there was Alice, sitting on a low bookshelf near a socket in the wall. She looked at a photograph of the
ocean, thought about Wednesday, rubbed her earlobe, and then noticed that Jackson, sitting still in his chair,
looked shaken. She had heard fragments of his accident account – a Ford, blue sky, crying, a billboard. She
sought some lure to pry him from his brooding: pancakes, boots, viruses, Hungarian, algorithms. Then she
talked about what she wanted to. Then about what she heard a friend say yesterday. Catching on to her
conscious efforts to detach him from his unwitting worry, he tried to get her take on political action but left off,
feeling disengaged from the conversation after he suggested that commands aren’t compelling and she
responded with a theory of dark matter.
Carolyn returned from her crossover car ¾ its hatchback perfect for the ingress of artworks ¾ with a new
construction on canvas of colored, textured surfaces that she proudly leaned on display against the tan leather
arm of a wingback chair. Jackson’s eye went first to a reddish knot of material that was off-center and projecting
some three inches forward from the board that held it. He experienced the string of thoughts “open heart
bouquet disheveled gift bow” as his eye followed the looping turns of this engimatic node that led left to a valley
or perhaps oval bowl or sea shell, painted a mottled purplish crimson and fringed on its sides with a small scree
cascade of round brown buttons. This oval closed back to photographs embedded in wax in the corner, encased
images of a time gone by, her friends in one linking arms in a game or whim at the beach, then, older, their
hands clasped in the midst of a casual walk near a lake, then, older yet, fingers twined around some herb sprigs
next to a handmade mug from which rose barely visible wisps of steam. Next and last was a square photo, it
alone emerging out of the dull, semi-transparent wax. It was a printed social post from today of Carolyn’s face
just in front of a blurred sculpture of a woman’s head in the background ¾ a roughly worked bust fashioned it
turned out by her mentor ¾ and Carolyn’s form a focused, fleshed out echo of this bust’s more inchoate
humanity behind. Carolyn’s expression in the photo radiated a vibrant intelligence barely tethered back by the
fine crows lines in her skin at the outside corners of her flashing eyes, these lines in turn leading into black
threads forming a web of semi-geometrical pattern stretched over the underlying board, a web that looked like a
cartographer’s markings or neural network or circuitry scheme running from her face back over and up to the
reddish knot, the whole diagramming some integral of her individuality as it flowed through an improvised
system animating her life in time. The look she had, both immediate and intent, reminded him of her striking
expression one day the year before after she had jumped from a creek’s far rocky bank, to a sandbar, to a mid-
stream stone, to the pebble shore on which he stood, her aspect briskly triumphant.
Still meditating on Carolyn’s improvised ensemble, Jackson was for a time at peace there in the silence all
around them. And then presently becoming aware of himself and the others in this situation, he spoke
articulately and with grateful appreciation for her hard-won work. His elan increasingly inspired by the creative
energy of her artistic expression, he became more positively animated, and started to talk about the art of lively
conversation, engaging the others with recounted tales of the legendary Oscar Wilde whose storied wit carried
many a memorable night. Amanda rejoined genially with famous quips from the dialogues in Wilde’s plays as
Carolyn had a sip of her cocktail, selected a triple cream truffled brie from the platter, and took the topic from
wit to wordplay to riddles to engimas.
V
The day after next, Monday, was another day entirely, and Jackson was feeling like himself again. He repeated
his accustomed routine, commuted to work in his vehicle, heard of current happenings in the news, and arrived
at his destination with a productive focus on his work priorities. In a recurring weekly meeting, he collaborated
with colleagues on a joint project, and, the short summit succesfully concluded in a single hour, he looked at his
calendar to see the schedule of the day’s events, first noticing, and second confirming, that he was double-
booked at 2:00.
Rather than cycle again through the mundane workings of his professional routine, let’s put a stop here. For
having now gone on and on, aiming at what is beyond us, at least, at a bare minimum, yes, we can confirm:
there’s a fine line between manifest presence and useless redundancy, a generative creation and a frivolous trifle.
But, yet, and also, there’s something curious about all this that might make us wonder: where does significant
meaning come from, and, in closing, could this story have been written by code?
Lynn Ciesielski
INFLAMED
Seneca—keepers of the Western Door Six Nations

dwellers of Gowanda—under the cliffs
Cattaraugus—rushing, fierce like Seneca burning stream

carves channels careens
through Zoar Valley spilling cascades a quarter-mile over splintering, shale slopes
Forests—
Chestnut Oak Red Oak Pine
Stomping grounds for the Clawfoot people—tale told a century old
This British bawd, it unravels fell prey to the syph her progeny
punished—hence with fused extremities generations carried the curse
Until—
ultimately, they made a pact—to squelch the stream, the gene—mate no more
FORGIVE ME
I digress diverge DISASTERS
still befall the splendor
deluges drownings deaths in this daunting

PLAYGROUND???
STRANGERS ignore the warnings—
Slippery shale mudslides drastic drops
Deh-he-wa-mis grouses—
They trash our lands— our mother sya di:tgeh1 them, angered
In turn we deliver them from their gaiwane’aksha2,
their brash defiance
tears searing our cheeks like lightning that ravages our methane-infused creek
1 2
evicts wickedness
Marc Lerner
The Apocryphal Deaths
Before entering into an exposition of the events that took place during and after the recent war, it must be
mentioned that all soldiers, in the kind of conditions that we experienced towards the end of that savage fight,
are touched in some small part or other with a measure of insanity. Those that were actually allowed to leave the
front and were taken back across the ocean to sanitariums or tribunals were extreme cases, but the difference is,
as the expression goes, one of degree and not of kind.
To recall an example from my own experience: in the last weeks, my platoon was holed up in what had been a
forest of blue gums on the eastern edge of the trenchline. In our miserable dugouts we had lain the night while
it rained sporadically and shells landed in the mud around us with a screeching violence like expulsions from the
nether world. In the morning everything was wet and the remaining stumps stood amputated and ghostly in a
thick mist. Bullets slammed at random into the trench wall just above our heads - the bullets which we had at
first feared, then became indifferent towards, and finally now even saw with some quantity of longing. With the
frenetic disorganization of an army on its last legs, my section alone was suddenly sent a few kilometres to the
west to the edge of the action, where it was quieter. Everyone was demoralised; as the corporal I went on sentry
duty first. Through the hole in the parapet I could not see more than a few metres in the mist, my feet sunk in
the slimy mud. Directly overhead the visibility was just as poor. The week before Private T---, a close friend of
mine from before the war, had been killed by a direct mortar hit on our lines. He was there one moment and in
the next his boots were lying all but empty. I looked up into the grayness above me. His smile and unique
humours wafted through my mind less like a memory than a receding dream.
One instant everything was silent, and in the next the catatonic haze above me was torn apart by an air battle.
The ancients reckoned the use of bow and arrow to be a cowardly withdrawal from hand-to-hand combat; I feel
resentment of a similar sort towards these new machines. I couldn’t see the planes, just hear the roar of their
engines and the intermittent crash of machine guns. Occasionally splinters of light from the guns would come
through the fog. From exhaustion I closed my eyes momentarily. When I opened them again the mist had
twisted into long ductile cylinders. These quickly extended into a writhing and nebulous mass, like a pit of
infinite and ravenous worms in the sky. Shadowed, slippery, manic. The gunshots seemed to be coming from
the interstices between their bodies like lightning issuing from between clouds. For a dreadful instant it
expanded to fill the whole sky. I use the word ‘dreadful’ only in an aesthetic sense, for I felt no fear or even
wonder. I could tell it wasn’t real, yet at the same time it seemed just as natural a thing as any other. The
hallucination lasted only a minute and then I saw nothing again but the fog. We had had no new ration packs
for four days. I told no one, but others told me of similar experiences.
No doubt the fatigue, demoralisation and near-starvation that we suffered through towards the end of our
losing conflict contributed to the sharp rise in such incidents. Nonetheless, it must also be noted that the land
which we pre-emptively attacked itself has some characteristics which, if not exactly psychosis-inducing, are
certainly disorienting to the unacclimated foreigner and were so from the very start. Once we got through the
northern port cities - which their government abandoned to us - and ventured into the open country, difficulties
of a natural sort beset us. The climate was as vertiginous as the landscape; within a few days we went from being
scorched by the sun in the desert to drenched in the torrential rains of a rainforest, and back again. Perhaps the
worst were the animals. We had to be given lessons prior to deployment on the varieties of poisonous snakes
and the ways of dealing with them. In the north, every river hides crocodiles that weigh over five hundred
kilograms just below the murky and frothing surface. In the absence of a defending army, one gets the
impression that the land itself is putting up a vicious fight. The cries of the birds are excruciatingly memorable:
in the country’s vast open spaces the hysterical shrieks of the cockatoo and the wedge-tailed eagle echo like
those of a maniac tightly confined in a straitjacket.
Soon enough, of course, the enemy did appear, and these early transcontinental adventures were replaced by
four years of methodical and senseless trench warfare. It was during the last six months of this period that the
apocryphal deaths, as they are now called, began. I happened to witness what is believed to be the very first
incident. We were in a quiet sector on a peaceful day. The landscape, too, was relatively untouched: mynah
birds flickered in the sparse eucalypts overhead like wraiths from a child’s tale. There was a rocky red soil
underfoot and the sun warmed our weary backs. I leaned against the trench wall and smoked my last cigarette,
looking up at the visible patch of pale blue wallpaper sky. Tranquil and alluring and dissociative. There was a
spring freshness in the air. Sergeant W-----, newly added to our platoon, stepped carefully up a ladder that was
propped against the wall a few metres away with a pair of binoculars. As soon as his helmeted head poked above
the sandbags his body was thrown violently backwards into the trench as though he had been shot. I hadn’t
heard anything, however; everything was as quiet as it had been. I rushed over to him and called for help. We
could find no wound, but his heart had stopped. Next week a corporal on sentry duty close by to us collapsed in
exactly the same way.
At first, these incidents were put down to sudden heart attacks and other medical maladies. The pattern,
however, soon became too common not to notice. Men were dying inexplicably, and always in positions where
they were vulnerable to enemy fire - but without actually being hit. Rumours circulated that military doctors
had looked over the bodies and confirmed that no medical defects had been found. Officially, nothing was said,
although trust in our government at this time was extremely low, and it may have only made the situation worse
if an explanation had been attempted. We found out later that news of the apocryphal deaths had spread
domestically coupled with all kinds of fanciful speculations. At the front, the already disastrous morale
plummeted even further and cases of soldiers openly refusing orders, although thankfully they never became
general, did increase.
A month before our final withdrawal, over the holiday period, we were stationed in what had been an idyllic
countryside. The remains of a farming fence still stood just behind our frontline trench and relatively infrequent
shelling had left the grazing land in a condition of less than total destruction. One morning we were awakened
at dawn by loud singing from the enemy trenches, which were not a hundred metres away. It was one of their
traditional holiday songs. We had heard nothing like this for the preceding four years; perhaps they had relaxed
in the knowledge they were almost completely victorious. We responded in kind with one of ours and were
greeted with loud cheers that were not at all derisive. I cautiously looked over the trench wall. In the foreground
wandered a vicious-looking dingo, its fur mangy and ribs standing out starkly on its body like bars on a cell.
Beyond, however, I was surprised to see a white handkerchief being waved from the other side in the gray
morning sun. Two men stepped out smiling and waving. They were not holding rifles. After a quick conference,
Corporal H---- and I went out to speak to them.
It was the sole holiday truce. Within minutes suspicious yet joyful men were streaming out of the trenches on
both sides and talking to each other; for a brief period we were released from the very maw of hell. On our side
our commanders would have liked to have stopped us, but their endless blunders had by this stage put them in a
position where they were unable to. I spoke for most of the time with a man name ‘Freddie’. He was taller than
me, thin, with sympathetic eyes. He showed me photos of his family and I did the same; I gave him my lighter
as a souvenir and he gave me a package of biscuits. With my halting command of his language I asked him -
after making sure no one on our side was within earshot - whether they had experienced anything like the
phenomenon of the apocryphal deaths. He knew nothing of it. In half an hour it was over, we went back to our
trenches and were at war once again.
This was not long before the end; soon our dictatorial form of government collapsed and a new era was ushered
in after our surrender. At home there were many changes to our way of life, freedoms increased greatly and
many latent possibilities were realised. For a time everyone forgot the apocryphal deaths as one wartime
nightmare among many. I have never been very interested in politics: it seems to me a pursuit that is an
abrogation of one’s duty towards one’s immediate surroundings, to one’s friends and family. An acquaintance
brought me to a talk being given by a certain provincial leader to discuss particular local and national economic
problems. It was in an old party hall now open for common use.
The atmosphere was hushed, expectant, revenant; as though it was the appearance of a medieval preacher.
When he came out he was small and fat, the loose folds of skin on his face and neck rubbery like a chicken’s.
The audience leaned forward in anticipation. He spoke quickly out of his ponderous bulk, mashing together
poorly pronounced words as though he might get something past the listener. It was not five minutes into the
talk that he keeled backwards in silence as though shot by a sniper. For a moment everyone was still, and then
the crowd surged forward in a mass of anxiety. He was dead; no cause of death was identified.
Our press is free now, and we know this is not happening in any other country but here. Not a week goes by
without rumours of a new apocryphal death. Typically it is a prominent public figure, and always in the act of
talking to a group, perhaps giving a speech. Sometimes, however, it will be no one more significant than a
manager in a factory or an office, talking to their workmates. Last week a police officer was struck while chasing
robbery suspects down an alleyway. Our kind-hearted criminals were so stunned to witness the bruited
circumstance that they waited by her body until more officers arrived. The people always seem to keel over
backwards, as though a bullet has hit them square in the forehead. Naturally, there is no such wound.
Confusion in our society has now become general, much more so even than in the immediate aftermath of the
defeat. Medical professionals and scientists posit explanations of varying sophistication for the phenomenon of
the apocryphal deaths, none of which seem quite convincing. Naturally, various religious groups have their own
eschatological interpretations of these events. Foreign agents and assassination plots are speculated about in the
press. Some segments of the population are suspected of deliberately sabotaging others through various kinds of
voodoo or witchcraft; these explanations are very popular and exist in infinitely complex variations. Some people
have withdrawn out of fear from social life altogether, preferring the mere prolonging of life to its living. All
interactions have become suffused with anger and suspicion and the apportioning of blame.
The streets of our fine and ancient cities are alternately emptied by terror and filled with protests that frequently
turn into violent riots. Another group affirms - perhaps correctly - that the deaths are not happening at all, that
they are all in fact explainable by already understood causes and that any perceived mystery is the result of a kind
of group hysteria. The tenuous threads of reasoning people have always used to parse reality have become
completely lost in a foggy and bilious skein of chaos. In our new and freer political system various leaders and
parties are now able to present their own solutions to these interconnected issues, and some of these seem
promising.
Mark DeCarteret
The Year I Went Without Having a Hit
I lived to avoid things. To bedevil the universe. For isn’t what is veiled on day one still veiled on day eleven?
Those hurricane models only demonstrating that the models aren’t working. Here’s footage of me in a straw
house. Me, wasting the talent I stole from the villagers. Atlantic City behind me. With its outbreaks. And gout.
The lowly wool of its blackening sky. Hell, tell them. Hell, let them all in on. Why my arm stays this way. A
“Haunting Maze of Injections.” But still toast this drought with the gaudiest of tears. And this leathery squint.
O my sweet diva-heart. Is that the cab that will take us to the missile site? Its yellow the yellow of a Grammy-
less wall. Its red the red of foreclosure. There’s no reason to feed you the lines anymore. Hum the melody.
Though the internet swears they still delivered a “Bum Rush.” And the “Mumbo Freed from the Jumbo.” For
the first time since “Old Doubts Abounding” went gold I’m digging your solo. Time was these were my worst
looks. EVER. Falling into a segue towards an era of guess work and drum tracks. Along with some joint
inflammation. The gut outgunned by parasites. It’s plain to see I’m no longer a professional. No longer the
tipped crown atop the Ritz crackers. Instead, joining programs to get early access to the newest releases. To get
at the buffet I used to think was an afterthought. When my Muse is still bent on surviving. To be on okay terms
with the universe. Merit mentioning. That and the other forty or so reasons why. I am leaving. I have already
left.
The Year I Went Without Wearing a Suit
I tried to lower myself into anything wool. Find the right blend for my tastes. But I’d never had the words for
this business. That drowsy look towards the lake. The mouthed startlement. Only the worried brow and the
cocktail sword that I choke. So, listen up, you! A crickets’ ticking off the summer. Some other Muse with their
tipped face and assumptions. I feel more for the leaf blower. Its blue-stink and bellowing. Or the oil-slicked
web trying to stay neutral between the mailbox and its flag. Than I do for these geese, segueing into their retro-
geometry, clamor. Or the trees and their secretive artistry. O how I guest-star their slowest of deaths, feats! You
yank that one thread and most worlds are quick to change course, grow sour on rousing the soul. It’s always the
fleas in my drawers that are self-taught, fluent in grace. Not the gnats staggering out into light. Best to table the
decision. Take fewer stabs at the beast. Until that time I’m forced to choose the one hand. Where in one fist,
there’s the necktie. Rolled up like fake grass. And in the other, a tissue. Stiffened from tears. What we can’t
toast we eat. What we think we can we feast.
The Year I Went Without Winning a Grant
See there, where the space has been penciled in, recently opened up to the public. Where no attempt has been
made to remodel. Or cleverly list. So that the shadows come and go as they please. Meeting up on occasion.
Overlapping. And where a certain insect has been known to emphasize its significance, teem. Along with their
offspring. And those trees you had earlier missed. Where the shadows will take leave of you. And the light will
peer through. You coming. So close to the sun you can taste it on your nose. And see it. Tiny crescents like
dots. In your thoughts and in mine. Tiny dots they will later compile. And hire people to study. Look here, they
will try always getting it right. Saying. How when the night cools into shadow. And the insects do loop-de-
loops. It’s more likely the colors will give in to rust. And the night that they pin-point will be dusted with
something like star-light or stars. And this is how it will go on. Forever. Yes, they’re actually hired. Figuring
into every one of your desires. But see here. You must say it. When worse inevitably comes to worse. You can
stretch out your fingers like this. Into crosses. Or something so sacred it’ll stay with you. Laying into your
tongue. But eventually yielding to song. How it could turn any second. With all of them laughing at you. And
filing it away. How it is all turning. They are 73% sure of it now. It has turned.
The Year I Went Without Taking a Breath
It's sick the price of medicine

Stand up, we'll put you on your feet again
Open up your eyes
Just to check that your asleep again
President gas is president gas again
--The Psychedelic Furs
My color was back yet again. And they’d relocated my hip. What I had left for a tail. It’s as if I didn’t lack for
anything. A moon yelling into the window. An EMT snipping my pants off with pins in his mouth. I keep
trying to tell them. There are thousands more just like me. Starting a new life. Up there in the pines. That the
wind is behind it all. Having figured out walls. What all this space will allow. And that it’s not the only thing.
My insurance plan covers. Besides all my lies. The work orders. Sad. We were all lovers once. Wed to the idea
of decency. Intellectual tells-all. Now, you’ll hear some laughter. And then you won’t. This here may be the
earliest I’ve ever read of snow. Its deep concern with light looking like pearls on the sill. I said to myself. No, I
say to myself still. Such a fuss to make over the loss of a little flesh. And recall how it felt to have even more
made of me. Leafed through like a cable series on the earliest recordings of farewells. A phone call caller’s ID
IDs as Mr. Victory. Asks if there will always be suffering. Because, if there is, he half-stutters. Because if there
is. I write now like I did. When I was a kid. There is snow on my eyes and my shoe-ties. And so much work to
be done when the wind finally dies. I don’t know what I have here on my fingers. Or where it came from.
Who’s ever sure they’re all here? Isn’t this why there are so many cameras? And updates? Take it outside, Mr.
Victory tells me. You are drawing a crowd. One thing is for sure. I’ve always been able to work a room. Ward
off most evil-doers. You’ve lived one life. Well. So hell, what’s another.
The Year I Went Without Using the Rapture App
Started with a rusty intonation. And ended with a star questioning its own density. Falling at a laughable rate.
Me? I’m too tense to dust. To tsk tsk another study of squid ink, the effects of certain desk sets on our capacity
to think. Scientists get trillions. Yet they give a poet an old adage badge. A recording of trees lovingly
procreating. And they take to the streets. Spank us. Thankfully, there’s a lot of disorders to be had. Enough
dross on the sword blade. Instead, we’ll opt to host our own game show. Where we worship ourselves through
yet another lens. Sit silently in a pew. Paired with a saint. Or the sin of the day. Pining for a decent
chiropractor. Our faces looking like a punch line. At least Nature gets it to go again. Only the rats eating in.
Tearing into the Cheerios. The antidotes we thought well out of reach. Like any party one fills up on the
peanuts. Then feels ill from the telling. An eternity tried on. And died for. Trees figuring on crests. In the
secrets of the rich. I’m my shittiest thought. I’m my kitty sticking its head in its own litter. Till he comes out a
cookie. A front man. A leper having healed himself. Jesus, say goodbye to your double. What the ghosts have
tracked in. I’m not sure if we should go back to sleep or just boogie. Trees would if they could. Help us pick out
which earrings go better. Or pee better streams. I miss underwear sales. Lasers vying for my soul. But still come
out with my pop gun. New ash on my tongue. Assorted covenants ever ready to take to the wheel. All of it has
me thinking. In a certain beguiling light. Out of context. Even I could be next.
The Year I Went Without Being Rejected
Back then we all faked our death one or two times. Either out in the shed or the back of a cab. And we said
what we thought. Then were done with it. Afterwards, the fact checkers ate of our bodies. And then doubled
for us. Bled out where the lasers found gold. But we never gave the facts trouble. Never fogged up the earth
with our doubts. Even left to myself. With my can of fat and pajamas. My toy coyote. I had a head smiling
back. A head that felt staffed by millions. Mornings, the sun would tunnel out the leaves and leave its skin for
our breakfast. Clouds would turn into suds. Nature was good like that. If the light grew the slightest you
couldn’t taste peach. Or the cheapest of whiskey. Only sugar. Fake sugar. Facts growing facts in the heat. Facts
nursing their own facts. The absence of God is just that. The word ordered out of the world. Instead, I have a
kitten. Sticking its paw in my side. Licked free of time. If I was going to do it I’d have done it by now. Even
then I’m only kidding myself. It’s one thing to hear the voice reaching into your midst. To vacate the cave again.
And another to look. Really cool doing it.
Mark DuCharme
Six Poems from Complicated Grief
After Sorrentino
The man who sold his image

Is waiting for the world at large
What humanizes his distraction
This structure, this thing unsolved
An orange is an orange is
Perhaps you are who were already
I care about postage stamps like I
Care for Nobel burnout literacy
Assertive wallflowers look the same

You know the trouble
Acquaint yourself with orange rustles
The end could always bristle
In faint economies of style

The end is all right here
Await syncretic rage
Paper like crumpled bone
The Man Who Knew Too Little
We moved independently
In unique meningitis
After the security forces dangled
Your foot in my gazebo
This is my birthday note

My complicated blending
Hidden arias of Zoom fatigue
& All the panic by which winter is transfixed
If you are fixed for lightshows

& Contingent strictures crimp your gloom
Waiting for a sideshow to arrive
Evade revival terms & mitigations
The slump isn’t always slantwise

Irregular in trauma stanzas leafing
Through motes as if they were boats
Intent to leave you out at sea
A Life of Concomitant Ruin
Are you now one of the ancients?

Is it you who still remains?
In what bitten irony
Are we still not blooming?
Come on & tell me your petty romance

I work my ass off to bleed in shadows
What do you do?
I had to be alone, & alone give answer
To a bare night flicker, when what went wrong

Went wrong
In impacted July, in an instilled night language
Where I barely embody this form
Written, as the past is an unwritten diamond

A conflation of books, something larger than we
As if contagion were our facts
A quick link to our low demands
Poem with Found Footage, Almost Paused
Think like a senator

A role not answered
I didn’t say I ever was
Near you once before
Think not like peons in redundant mourning

Sometimes, all we are is almost paused
We’ve got the questions; you’ve got the space heater
Whatever it is you think life means
Like a profit on the gloom

Until you become profligate in winter’s damage
Premeditated, when no one hides
Like a child full of bugs
With evenings laid down

In bare ghost-damage
Like a child of medicated stenographers
You still aren’t all you’ve won, in summer’s pre-imagined ruin
I Know What the Ticket Taker Means
“A metonym for aquatic fate,”

She said, but all too darkly
For the recording to be transcribed
In a language of polyglottal animals
Reimagine your dead future

As a language of processed trees
Emit discarded notebooks others have transcribed
Like a prayer or myth of the discrepancies of summer rain
At pale misreadings, some do backflips

In time’s placid violence
As if the chair herself were a know-it-all background vocalist
I know what the ticket taker means
When he calls me by my shadow name,

My fate
Who refused once to look at you in haunted vestibules
Until vagrant dealers laughed & quaked
The Fates
Give me a break, Rodefer

We live or die on equal terms
Faded, like the outside
I love to love your love that burns
Trying to put the blame on

Your faint, grandmotherly reflection
Attrition as social distancing
Had I not become nobody else
Before you were an active verb

With faint Hollywood eyes
Have you read any good poems lately
As a class of skies
Moot, when nobody’s altered

Or answered in tomorrow’s goodbyes
Disordered before lost
In whatever nascent selves the fates conceal
Mark Fleckenstein
ACCIDENT (after Jack Gilbert)
Watching last nights’ snow fall from the rear window

of a neighbor’s car. White, and not the same white
that fell last night. The moon, sun and stars continuing
last nights’ argument. The light uncluttered and graceful,
unlike the wind trying to move it.
THE PARTY OF THE FIRST PART
The sky, clouds, wind, temperature, barometric

pressure, humidity - all of it too fuchsia. The boat
left three years ago, taking the fog with it
like a tablecloth. You were spoiling for a fight
like a dizzy turtle. “Chicken salad, tuna salad,
cheese straws, they had everything.” The room,
one step closer to another, paused. The wallpaper
faded as the month ended. Our new neighbors,
inexplicable visit extending velvet pillows
like urgent while you were out messages
from various European locales and Asia Minor.
They were graciously inept, clubfoot transients
in situ. Sleepwalkers or impatient insomniacs?
The newspaper was late in arriving, desperately
bereft of color. “I was stuck in English
and four other languages.” Another question
for the authorities to consider. I left the porch light
on, just in case. It didn’t fool the moths
The pleasure of these quieter days: none of country

rhetoric, vacuum salesman moonlighting
as census takers, just routine, intimate questions.
Whose turn is it to take out the garbage?
When will this day end?
If a train heads east at 4 a.m. going 60 miles an hour
and another heads west at 71.3/8s miles an hour,
how soon will you be leaving?
That you're better looking a year later, and then again
after ten is no surprise. The years spent in foreign
currencies, that hill behind the other one, the photographs...
I’ve gone back to bed in that same dirty light
that constantly followed us spilling coffee as it
went. It was after Labor Day. Whatever worries
were more subdued like visits to a dilapidated
circus and zoo. Not a white linen faux pas
anywhere in sight. Ah, those memories overlap
like shovel handles, lives meticulously fashioned
for different occasions: one for London, Santiago,
Addis Ababa, Monte Carlo, Tsiblisi, Istanbul,
Pocatello, Idaho. Two arms between radio
blasts from passing cars like a new coat
trying to make change. Neighbors are always two
sizes too small. The post office closed for the weekend
and still I’ve yet to find my casual persona.
But it’s not the first time the party left the train
station, the hosts heaping counterfeit caviar
like small talk, innuendos, sensitive political
scuttlebutt and Hollywood insider news
onto everyone's plate. It was a day resembling
this one and Midwestern. Fourteen steps east
of the kitchen window, the ill-tuned piano,
and two pictures: one is blue, the other, of parakeets
and captioned I was only joking. Please let me come home.
Human nature is liked Greek architecture:
the usual weights and measures mean nothing.
It’s chinese take-out, lipstick, history lacking
empty liquor bottles and swirling organ music.
Even money is light and unfettered,
like an egg chasing a chicken.
This is how to appreciate beauty.
Would you come here if your life were in flames?

To travel, to shop, set the table for a small miracle?
“We've grayed a little, but we're still recognizable.
Last time I had the board meeting; Kathy came
along and shopped her brains out. I didn't know
you were here.” Between Tuesday, next week,
marvelous and unexpected beauty, is where
the door should be. We lacked nothing of consequence;
language, colloquial winks and nods, gestures,
fashionable attire, postcards marooned against
the wine glass, addressed and ready to roll.
You never return from where you've been.
It’s that someone you hoped to know better.
The letters, their hand-cancelled postmarks
tell no tales. Not that it matters. Anonymous
buildings put on more directions, advertise
empty offices, clouds improvise monologues
in ambiguous accents and could use a closer shave.
Spring fell against our end of the world
amid a three week snowstorm, and promises of
the rebirth of romance. I caught you looking at me
without my head again. All afternoon the aroma
of burned coffee, bacon, broken china, and a debate
of pocket change economic theory ensued,
concluding with the perfect martini –
the vermouth staring through the gin
like sunlight piercing a piece of ice.
LAMENTATION (1st Version)
I can die now I just begun to live.
--Charles Olson, ….
Misery loves what’s left out:

dirty glasses, an argument
over new drapes, how to

compose a friendship.
No one comes out alive,

unscarred, content.
There’s knowing and the door

the water glass tried to open.
The moon, close enough

to imagine someone’s touch,
still, and will never answer

LAMENTATION (2st Version)
Misery loves the torn white scraps

of shirt and gown, iridescent cloth,
left by the dead any night

after familial wandering.
Daylight misquotes their thinking

LAMENTATION (3rd Version)
At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net
-- Charles Wright, from “Spider Crystal Ascension”
Daylight misquoting torn white scraps

and shirts left by the dead
after familial wanderings Night

upon night Knotted, frayed thinking.
An unnecessary failure of red thoughts.

WITTGENSTEIN
1.0
When you’re twisting in the wind,

the landscape is an afterthought.
1.1
The question follows you around the room,

one more extra eye.
1.2
The heart is a syllogism; if A=B, and B=C, look.

He lives through his skin.
1.3
The history is impertinent, bones like birds.

"That's why I'm here, to tell people things.”
1.4
A sliver’s understanding the world.

The telephone is a shadow.
2.0
An empty room is almost possible.

Sleep has a body, soul and mute
2.1
because its voice is a screen.

Action is only peculiar, a bat's flight,
2.2
a butterfly speaking.
Being alive is chemically accidental.
3.0
Memory is a term of absence, like a mirror.

Poetry is thinking how to makes bones beautiful.
4.0
The hand I would offer cannot

also hold the nail it hammers
Mark Harbinger
TRIUNE, ENDEMIC
NO, WE INSIST
My wife walked into the room, drooping
face a death mask. Muffled speech,
scared eyes numb to my probing
questions: "Are you ok? D'you fall, yes?"
…Will you?
But, you can't, can you? Can't stop grasping

for the words. You reach
out from what reminds us that we're dying.
But that fight: that's what separates us
From my Pop, twenty-two years ago this Thanksgiving,

I got the news: He'd been dead a week.
He had refused meds for months up—leading
to his demise, under suspicious circumstances;
Or from my Mom, his ex-, no longer living

the life of a free spirit. But rather one to preach
the Good Word from her easy chair in front of the 700 Club, fearing
the Christ of her own passions,
and too afraid of the world to leave her house to visit me for…
This Thanksgiving,
where even my own ex-
is present. Well here, not appreciative. We're all here for the kids, who're toasting
A good holiday. And for ourselves.
So much to carry: the dying, the living,

and the Dead. It feels as thought they must be let go— not forgiven, but left to fall—
to teach what will happen if they just, simply insist on continuing
to live
in this fashion.
(2020)
~~~
DEATH RATTLE
Old man watching as the (hourglass)
Shifting sands pass
Below, falling to mark the passage of time; but,
He doesn't hear it,

stops feeling it. Won't believe in it.
Eventually, movement ends.
Does time stop when the sands refrain?
Or will a baby grab the timepiece

in its perfect, little hand? Tiny fingers
clutching and shaking, filling the air with the sounds of life.
(2021)
~~~
REQUIEM FOR DESSERT, 2021

I've been seeing shadows.
Not every day. Pass.
Not in the corner of my eye, but just outside.
When I turn to focus—I've missed it. A warning.
It is too soon to mourn? Us, working about the yard. Making love.
The shape sweeps the cobwebs from the corner of the room when I'm not looking.
Pass, after pass.
Outside the bars, traffic, ambiance, the grinding lives restart. A final repast,
weighing my life against the time re-meaning.
You can only focus so much on what's in front of you.
And for dessert?
Pass. The dark shape, moving, refreshes my attention: shadows are where the light refuses to leave—
There it is again! Please. Don't take me yet:
I've still got this meal to finish.
(2021)
Mark Young
6 Visual Poems
Endgame in Uber
Krapp's Last Uber
Malone Dies in an Uber
The Unnameable Uber
Waiting for Uber
Watt Uber
Michael O. Starr
Machine for Pigs
cam glam no place to hide no way to go my productivity zone is here-now why-o why-o
why
the cat raises its head away from me
Humph!
so proud it is
it's a girl
by the way
she left
or he
whatever
catch in the cage the warrant for the soul contractor

sole reason being he was mended over
spittin'
s'all it is
sissssssss
raw
in the naval
ahoy
it's better than haiku

but how could i end it that way on you
one two
skip my vulgarity for now
i meant to say it
did i ever
and traditional English logic
err rules
err grammar
and I'm bored of it but the reader isn't
so I'll pander like the best
that's really all your art is about

pleasing you
placating
I'll pander like the finest

and make a dime of myself
because eating myself for dinner

is the only way to survive
long-term
and this time I will end it like that on you

Instruction Set: Semi-conducted
what do i want send it

check
send me my name in writing
lick the envelope
yell at mother
beat your records
they are scratched
the cat is tawdry
accompanied hopelessness next door
you visited no one there
ate a fine meal
corrupt crousettes and fickle foie-gras
[Google Docs can't make up its mind
if that word is misspelled or not]
though this one was
your name last I heard it
was Lost@Sea
never drowned in your own vice
such ideology
nipple-sucking is normal for a babe

why red zone it
don't forget to apostrophize instead of catastrophize
the latter on my mind not because i do it but because
i was taught
i was taught that glamour comes in phases
that the first one is the most laborious
that the late ones make you stupid and powerful and famous and wealthy and useless
a parasite, in other words
like the ex-CEO of Pepsi Co.
who, bitch, said asking for a raise is "cringe-worthy"
wow she learned one word from the youth
bitch, said asking her name in ink was just the beginning
no, didn't end it there
went on to buy my house in Florida
my home, my pool where no one drowned Lost@Sea
mail me there
we've gotta big'ol' mailbox
that that means...
waiting for your entire crew

croutons on the salad blown off
with an air gun
the generic brand
not special fluid dynamics just
normal like blasts
and the Cali "like" is enshrined in me
I wonder if the kids still say it
where is it really from
did we appropriate it?
they didn't teach that in school
they didn't really teach much at all
least of all how to make friends
really, they just set you loose
in the cage of other wild animals
and told you to turn in your homework on time
poor instruction set
bad computer
there's something missing from all this

or is it just the story linearity you're used to
that my mom says which she was taught is really a waste of time
story, at all, legitimately
taught by her mother
my grandmother
reading, stories, books--all a waste of time
what say you now
yearning for that which Soviet Russia taught was frivolous
as frivolous as I thought making friends was in America
not to end on a bad note but let's not be rotten

pick the biggest note with your crystal
pick
pick it up at the corner
toss that trash into the bin
for the truck to pick up
later
earlier I was taught that pickups come at 5 AM
now they're split--
half recycling in the morning /
half trash in the afternoon--
or the other way around--
either way it makes no sense but sends of output beams
& what are we talking about anyway
what trash thoughts
nonsense for the missense
my sensibility shut,
looking for hearing ears rather than seeing eyes
gemstone hearts rather than computer crystal minds.
Beneath Dawn
The shark paddocks dimly lit swim to

And fro
And to
And fro
And I am eaten and regurgitated
Fed to the birds by the fish by the river
Swimming upstream to start
The vicious cycle all over again
There once was a stork

And it was the only one
It was remembered by civilization
Until it was shot
By a pebble from a child's sling
Proving that attempts at parables are worth little
Here are the attempts I have wrung forth
In my wrists
So weak
So feeble
Futile Enlightenment
We have to hurry they won't understand us if we pause at the levee

Down by the--no, I'm sorry--no, there
And there
The shooting stars
They are the dead falling
(In the sky)
There goes another one, I was to say
But interrupted by the luminescence of it
(The sky)
Colliding with the water
We at the docks do not swim
We here use boats and oars
To make our way
I hope this is a hint
Someone picks up
--This atom of wisdom--
Maybe someone will be better off

Everything is Made of Glass
Stay back, I knew you

We knew each other
The former statement weakened by the latter
They are just statements
You make so many
I wish I knew how it were possible
To be so
Superficial
You and the billions

Who feed off skin deep
And lunge like
The probosci of mosquitos
Into the blood
Of the innocent
How society has fallen
From glorious days
Wonder when, why, they there then
Will make a recovery
Hasten too quick
Thinking mindful, thinking of heaven
Thinking of gates shut and open
Some in opposite directions
As in America as in England
CJ CJ CJ you were a friend so that was special to me but then again

what is that you said
, you got the wound wide enough but not deep enough,
and then why did you stop?
I guess friendship is a fickle thing in England too.

Gone
By the boots,
By the straps,
Nature wrings you forth and you fall clumsily into half ways forward and half ways back
The nature of direction does not hold much under (in) the (s)way of guidance
Irony of physics
Two-tonne engine belts rotating to provide the torque for military ships
They will soon be retired
(Soon to be retired, oh~)
I see no end for these things
I see no end for it
(Oh~(!))
The Dark Horizon
I am so
broken, there is nothing to say
The sheer vastness of the void is to be
Explored
Never mind that
On the inside
But I would make better than a robot
Had we twenty
To venture forth
Into space
And build we a new colony
And start a new family
And see the seeds prosper
And the mystery enshrine us
And what happens then?
The dark horizon
Will see us to sleep
Tomorrow
Tomorrow
Tomorrow
And This is Terrible
The repletion of fox-littered dew-stricken madness in the night

Fills me with grief
It isn't that simple
I think you know by now
That the heavy lead at the bottom of your feet
Is equivalent to the light alloy at the top of your heart
And the metals crackle
Statically
And they make you feel cold
And I know this cycle of sibilance inundates the sick with more
There is no hope
The vicious memories are now
Life is this
And this is terrible
When My Liver is Smarter than My Brain
When my liver is smarter than my brain

It tells me that the poison is up there
Not down here
Down here we are realists
Down here we are pedants
Down here we know
And show
And blow our loads
On two-ton trucks
Brigadiers made for manhunts
And a lottery ticket to heaven
I'm in the stairwell
I fall over
They do not accept the clumsy
Well sorry
I was drunk
Sober 6 months
After 10 a day for several weeks in a row
That didn't get me on the transplant list
I've experienced grievous liver
I'm not a therapist I just have an analytical mind
And a computer
end it here or one more beer?
say yee puppeteer
I must pee on the bathroom floor to clean it
a friend told me that was what it is
and it sounded like a good idea to me
because the smell of urine
anything
is better than what i have
what more is there to say

things regress sometimes
i guess we are living through that
and most are blind to it
i like seeing
but i don't like being surrounded by the blind
no offense
except hell of taken
stop being blind
or I'll rip
or the traffic
oh god i feel light
did something just happen
or did i ascend
Michael Reich
1.
data
,
control
power
people turn to death
data is dead
;
we love it
we masturbate to it
we love making love with cold
dead
data
-------
2.
data's goal is power
learn to have
power
over others
grow
change them
change their genetic line
alter their
tree
of
knowledge
-------
3.
power
"understand customer"
in
sterile
environment
wouldnt make sense

in
lush
where
with people
get
addicted
to
the "unalive"
feeling
moving them towards death
moving them towards inability

to know
on their own
move them towards
needing "
direction
"
for you
know better than the

m
you know them

i
n
side out
you know their choices
i
n
to screen
"know them"
better than they know them

because you
"feed" them
aaaaaa
in their feed
pig trough
fattened up to slaughter
entertainment clicky
glutton dog
master feeds
,
entertainment.
next please ,
more data
more screen
more
ux designers pushing
linkedin "professionalization" course
on
making gamified
addictive
non human
away from human interaction
"converse with computers!!"
-----
4.
observer
position
quantum
reality effect
designed you
to have little power
to affect the real world
to be
unable
to
b
e
e
the
butterfly
that
flapped its wings
----
5.
distance from
"being in"
sitcom deception
trapped in
laugh track
the fake
comfort
of ordered
chaos
writers
make you feel
they control the chaos
for a little while

anyway
------
6.
they
know how to
take away
lives and loves
give your attention to them

you don't even know
they have it
Nathan Anderson
Cancel the flood
synechdoche of 'A'
leading breathlessness
no lung full
and
going
turning into a rattle

in the
hand
forgetting this
recession
recession
recession
recession
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[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]
how bland?
Navigations 'Y' and 'X'
Abrahamic
synesthesia
brick wall
limiting
limiting limiting
causeway backing
over this
shunted magnetic
magnetic magnetic
the sudden burst of conflagration

starting through the threading turn
not happenstance but harried over
smoking bridgework afterthoughts
holding closer to the rib not spoken
taking holding from the touch not
spoken
spoken spoken
collectively as...
'do not take it back'
'unsavoury'
'drink'
Point One (.1) of
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////////////////utmost/////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////spoken///////////////////////////////
//////////////////////////////////////////////////way////////////////
///called///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////celestial/////////////////////////////////
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////and////
//////////gone/////////////////////////////////////////////////
///////////////////////////////////not/////////////////////////
/////////////////named/////////////////////////////////////
///////////////////////////////////////////////as////////////
////////angel/////////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////horn////////////////////////
//////////////////////////////////////////////now//////
/////////////only//////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////saxophone////////////
//////or//////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////silence////////////////////
///////////called/////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////as///////////
//////////////silence//////////////////////////
//////////////////////////////called//////////
/////as///////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////silence////////////
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///////////////////////////
//////////////////////////
//so////////////////////
The Extension of Body
calligraphy sweeping
better than
///////// (as tempest)
wrongful walking
////////// dropping as the hole does
drop//////////////////////////////////////
how as though (ingested)
fragmentary///////////////
not as not
and gone//
(polemic)
(satisfaction)
(known)
not as//////////////////// as not

not ///////////// not
as////////// as
not ///// not
as not//////////////////////////// as not
The Rain Signal
prostration cannot fall prostration cannot fall

it is too
glandular
there is not enough
of this steam
to continue
skull shaped we
enter
not as
not with
singing hymning
found salvation
in our
beaks
repeating
always
repeating

Thoughts on a Uniform
closed [cap]
****************colour**
*******colour******
hedgerow
always going
we stood
[on stone] watching
light
*******diffuse*********
*************diffuse******
as shelters
come and
go
without wording
[lost]
trumpet player
[needing]
***sound*************
*************sound*
Nelson Gary
Shabbat
At the Sabbath Queen’s feet,

The serpent coils, not asleep,
But the reverie of good and bad
Angels proceeds, promotes
The woman of valor in the market.
I smell fish, eat meat. Dinner
Has my stomach squirming
In the tension of the abyss quit
but
Returned with a roar after prayers
That only Lady Wisdom understands,
Locked out of the rabbi’s house
By starry tuxedo night in the back
Of a limousine that gives sound
To the bubbles of champagne,
Which used to kiss my lips.
For a song of mysticism betrayed

For the plain of the workaday
That wrecks me in strips of beef
Forked over as rungs to Maimonides,
I cannot complain about you coiled
Around the community’s feet.
We deserve this enmeshed in the meat.
I don’t know that God really does
Punish as much as he gives you work.
Bohemian Cacophony
The shut-up changes smile, swimming

In a season other than the currents forgotten.
The forged name autographed to a golem
Is more than a betrayal rearranged. Protected
By the less than a brain with muddled mindsight,
The blazing hallucinations of the boulevard better
The counterfeit clockwork of dream transition
Stolen and horded as sold-out flesh posed, viewed
Through holes in the walls. The desire to fake
It, fictionalize the grand narrative with actual
Goals inward developed as lands from the heights
Of delusion derived from Prague and styled
into Elsa Lancaster’s
Hair held high with Aladdin Sane bolts of lightning
Twisted, bent, curvaceous as the sweet things
Swerving from cancer in cherry condition, warps
Mary Shelley into Beethoven Boulevard with traffic
Pathos making the motion picture irascible. Classical
Crash with Baroque romances the tabloid tally

Of the everyday; cannot get out of this funk danced
Outside the museum door, diagnosed with cynical
Depression. Perhaps, the goal of ghosts is to perish
In another rhyme far from well-rounded legends
Gathered for stout during the holidays, strung along
By the entrails of the flashbacks. Auschwitz
Crematoria in currents unforgotten, the lessons
Of the golem, who is a compact civilization,
Has his ticket stamped for the Old New Synagogue
To get lost in the thick Bohemia before littered
Too much more with sudden superstars
And multinational corporations, some serving
Soldiers who have threatened to kill me with their
Big Mac attacks, a midnight cruiser. History addicted
To the past, the piranhas in Walden Pond, the pencil
Factory has not been sharpened for a while, Pinocchio.
I have Basquiat written all over my face, wearing
Your ghost as a smock. The smoke rises and we talk
About being left behind by Anna Karenina and the train.
A God from the Machine
I despise my toothed disillusionment triggered

By clinical depression. Spears are thrown
That become the bars of gates, my rib cage sore
From embracing them before hearing your
Blues wailed. I taste bruises on your body
Resembling picnic strawberries. You scratching
Your orgasm’s obituary on my back has barely
Helped either of us with these bones picked
About gated communities. The ugliness heaved
Was beauty believed for those moments warped.
The catharsis of kindness ecstatic almost anonymous,
Though there was exchanged insight open, honest
As a god from the machine saved a date for us
On his busy schedule of impossible miracles.
It did not matter to me in the least if he were
Creditable as we turned the crank on the corner
Into excitable ventriloquist of holiness hocked.
I would like to think I have worn this disorder

Well, the whirlwind cycle of it with its mortar
Voice solid building an exclusive residential area
With its sanctuary of breath unstrained to the point
Where restraint is a rumor, my spirit free, unfettered,
Filled with the storm clouds of black humor, a much-
Needed rain touched upon in the dry desolation
Cracked into canyon come up in years, a fire hazard.
Whatever passion in exurbia excuses the fireplace
To take the place of television is that sculpted silence
Enlivened, captivating with its only sound being
The crack of fingertips, the snap of Beats and hypnotists.
I despise my toothed disillusionment triggered

By ocean-foam colored enamels in background
Of sunset gums blurred by lost bets at nonexistent
Casino in the marina where I met you, both of us
Hungry, me literally, and dirty as the sand swept
By wind, by water, breathing your name. Tour
The time past, lameness healed, the prayed layers
Of complexity peeled to answers in actions, not
In words hurled as spears against a lack of inclusivity
With man-made lake still but for the ripples
Of swans and ducks paddling this much out
Of the frothing mouth of a god from the machine
Laughed out of town by sibyls in an academic magazine,
An article about the homeless and the poetry scene.
Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Servants in Protection
Plate 1: This Tactical Flower
Plate 2: The Efficient Curve of Vulnerability
Plate 3: Eight Seconds within Inches of Miles
Plate 4: The Chapter and the Real
Plate 5: Opportunities
Plate 6: Rigid Deterrence
Plate 7: Curbing Consequences
Source of Text and Images for Servants in Protection
Bowman, Robert M. Star Wars: Defense or Death Star? Institute for Space and Security Studies: 1985.
Ophir J. Bitton
Only a Chap
Dodgy bugger even

a Quinn of shorts
Felt hat and Flannel
shirt
Corduroy trouser and
bare feet
Leather loafer with
leather soles
Not much for creativity
Not more for flare
Commonplace in wit
just below in charm
Yet hardy like thick
stew
Not a satin invitation
to the glance
Not an affront to
passerbys
Invisibly lonely
and a trifle sad
Puss Puss
So here it is
the flea on the
Cat, it’s not this
it’s that, hand
table tap tap, fidgeting
feet can’t nap
the door is open
the bar closed
ice diluting the
courage rye serum
3-fold napkins
like EMTs await
tears, stuttering
thickens the air of
undigested proclaims
neon taunting from
a cross
broadway, “no
vacancy” Flash
flash, the bus boy
the trash, can’t
clean this table
spit filled hieroglyphics
lopsided fable
“I’m sorry,” three-
fold, vacant, “it’s
not this, it’s that”
(don’t swear don’t
swear don’t swear)
“I swear”
tat tat tat
that’s the flee on
the cat.
New Town
One car
Not a horse in sight
The town was loud
Its streets alight
A stranger is a
stranger just the same
Not as recognizable
as then
The sheriff knows
no names
He sits far above
the street
Everyone sauntering
beneath his feet
A coin won’t buy
a stranger all that
much
Pamela Miller
Photo by Maelle Ramsay on StockSnap
Mr. Bent Out of Shape

Mom always told me I’d have to bend over backwards to make it. So I tried it one night at a gig
in San Francisco and—oh, fuck! Something inside me snapped like a broken E string. Five years
later I s�ll can’t straighten up, my locked body arched like a Japanese bridge. Thank Jesus I can
s�ll play my ax! The roadies bear me onstage on their shoulders, place me gently on the floor
like a three-legged stool. But when the lights come up, I’m warped and proud. I defy you to tell
me I don’t tower sky-high as I roar my afflicted anthem up to God.
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels
Mr. Scar
If your face looked like a cracked
windshield, wouldn’t you drink your life
away too? All I ever wanted was to be
flawless—Michelangelo’s “David”
covered with diamonds. Now I’m a Sis�ne
fresco besmirched by hideous graffi�.
Why did I have to steal that creep’s girl
and get carved up like a standing rib
roast? Look how the shadows point right
at it! Only when the alcohol gilds my
blood do I become a masterpiece again.
Mr. Make ’em Happy
This lady hadn’t laughed for eleven
years �ll I twiddled her earlobe with my
tongue. I once stopped a man from
leaping off a ledge by stroking him with
a parakeet. Now he beams like a
halogen lamp. Sad people are merely
houseplants some black thumb
neglects to water. Every morning I kiss
my hands for an hour to rev up my
comforting touch. Now tell me: What
forlorn part of you can I delight?
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels
Photo by Anastasia Gepp on Pixabay
Mr. Forbidden
If you look at him too long
we’ll have to arrest you.
Surely you recognize the
Mark of Interdic�on,
emblazoned across his face
like a KEEP OUT sign. And
the horned head of Satan
we’ve branded on his chest
to spook the curious away.
“Why is he so verboten?”
That’s no concern of yours.
“Is he a vic�m of illicit
experiments? Are there
others like him?” You’re
asking too many ques�ons.
Don’t make us call the
mutant dogs.
Mr. Delusional
There’s a nest of Venusians hidden in the walls. Their incessant writhing ra�les
the house all night. Why did their dastardly planet send them here to torment
me? I’ve been hunting them for months with a Venusodetector I built myself,
my hands urgently gloved against stray radiation. My boss has stopped calling
to ask why I’m not at work. My wife left me when I bought the flamethrower.
Their gleaming green bodies are a buried treasure I must excavate before it’s
too late. For God’s sake, they’re all I’ve got le�.
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels

Partha Sarkar
The blood sucker in the universe
The blood sucker in the universe.

Has been broken the dyke in the Milky Way.
That’s why, prevails in the water project a drought
And goes to the sea a vacuum to fill the blanks.
But there is a health project in the mass rally
During the epidemic!
How do you ignore the wisdom of Mr. know- all?
If one is satisfied with little

There will be no confusion
In using toothpaste in the preamble.
The silent Corridor and the Postmortem Report
Another farce.
The summit to stop the global warming.
Yet, the chaos are there
In the small intestine of the revolutionary and
Goes on the investigation
As is sick the earthen pot.
Yet, none notices the problem
Before the fall of the planet.
So,
Disappears the wisdom of the clodhopper.
Here comes the silent Corridor
With the hilarious Postmortem Report.
Hail civilization.
The engrossed corpse with a raven
The engrossed corpse with a raven –

The two migratory philosophers in the backbone
Of the posterity.
They do the sum throughout the day
Though there is a reluctant slumber
And in the slumber there is an air-conditioned station.
Suspends in the air the red signal.
That’s why, there is no direction
And so, has no conclusion of the birth the engrossed corpse.
Paul Tanner
the lesser spotted customer
she pointed at the spot on my nose:

bad, that, she said.
I didn’t say anything.

I just carried on
scanning and packing her groceries.
there’s no need to get offended, she said.
whatever, I sighed
and you probably heard

her resultant cries
for the manager
from wherever the fuck
you were.
you hated me first
I get in early BECAUSE I’M NOT ENTITLED TO BENEFITS. I do the job

of three or four men BECAUSE THAT’S HOW I PAY RENT. I work through
my lunch break BECAUSE THE TAX MAN ISN’T GOING TO PAY HIMSELF.
I stay after closing BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS A PAY RISE. I let
the boss give me the store keys even though I’m on a sales assistant wage
BECAUSE I INSIST ON NOT STARVING TO DEATH. I mop up and lock up
then get in early again the next day BECAUSE I’M NOT ENTITLED TO BENEFITS.
repeat, but never rinse.
boogie up our flail
it was during all the covid stuff.
I was manning the door of the shop

when she came over to me:
what’s this queue for? she said.
to get in, I told her.
yeah, I know THAT! she said. OBVIOUSLY!

I mean, WHY are people queueing? she looked over my shoulder.
you don’t seem to have many customers in there.
maximum capacity, I said.
you’re telling me that if I wanna come in your shop,

to spend my money – which pays YOUR wage, by the way –
that I have to queue up for the privilege?
yeah, I said.
well, good job I wouldn’t be seen dead in your shitty little shop, then,
she said. isn’t it?
and she stood with her hands on her hips, waiting for me to answer.
yeah, I said.
yeah? well, hope you’ll be happy when the shop goes broke
and you lose your job! she said, walking away.
cos I know I will be!
finally: we were in agreement.

won’t want
he comes up to the counter.
can I help? I ask him.
I don’t know, he said. CAN you?
I’ll try, I said.
EXACTLY! he points. you don’t KNOW if you can help me or not,

because you don’t know WHAT I need yet, DO you?
message received:
offering help is offensive, apparently.
message received, but he continues to elaborate:
you wait for ME to TELL you what I need,

and THEN you can make your promises to help, ALRIGHT?
I hold my hands up…
ok, he sighs. now then. do you do Flamin’ Hot Cheetos here?
nope, I say.
nobody needs Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

I’d point this out
but he’s already left the shop
and anyway I suspect he knows the difference:
he’s stopped to chat to someone outside.

he’s smiling.
he seems fine now.
bagged up
wanna bag? I asked.
yeah, he said.
10p, I told him.
no, he said. it’s 5p.
no, I said. it’s 10p.
thought it was 5p, he said.
curses!
he’s cleverly deduced
my grand scheme
to defraud the
general public
by charging everyone for a bag
twice!
and it was all coming to fruition

until he exposed me.
obviously.
hence me still working

here.
bastard’s row
not a line of the unemployed

or the throng for your nearest public toilet
or the lemming voters
or an NHS waiting list
or a football crowd
or the string of punters outside your mother’s bedroom
can compete with
the queue
at this checkout:
look at their faces

smell those breaths
hear them cries
submit to their demands
feel their fear
fear their pent-up sporting spirit:
it’s more or less

all of those queues
and more,
for:
what if the two for one offer

doesn’t go through?
my god, what then?
WHAT THEN?
co-shirker
you hate how he does this:

you hate how he
doesn’t do anything,
how he lets you unload the pallet
and bring it out onto the shop floor
by yourself
while he just arses about on his phone.
you hate how
he puts you in a position
where you have to tell him: look,
the sooner we get all this out, the sooner we can go home
and you hate how
he looks up from his phone
just long enough to show disgust:
long enough to make you feel like a fool.
you hate how he makes you
hate yourself
before he goes back to swiping at his phone screen
and you start unloading the pallet …
and then
when management wants to know
why stuff’s not getting done,
he tells them
that you
are the one not pulling your weight.
cut to a year later:
now he’s your supervisor
and you can hate him
instead of
or at least as much as
you do
yourself.
dec. 2666th
there’s a crowd outside the shop.
they’re blocking the entrance:

banging on the windows,
tugging at the handles of the locked doors,
making the building rattle.
you can’t get near it.
you go sit on the bench opposite,

watching those zombies clawing to get in …
the shop finally opens.

they spill inside …
you follow them in …
the supervisor is waiting in the middle of the shop floor

still
amid the noisy blurs,
cool
surrounded by the rabid rampage
and she glares at you, tapping her watch …
she won’t discipline you yet –

she lets you do the shift first
and waits until you’ve closed the shop
before writing you up a warning for being late
and you know all these people

who kill themselves at Christmas?
is it really out of loneliness
or for the exact opposite reason?
journey
… AND I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MUCH THAT HAS GONE UP!

she goes on. THAT, she points, THE PORRIDGE!
CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?
CAN’T YOU SAY SOMETHING TO THEM?
OH, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE
GOING TO SAY! YOU’RE GOING TO SAY
YOU DON’T DECIDE THE PRICES!
BUT YOU TAKE THE MONEY OFF US, DON’T YOU?
YOU DO THEIR DIRTY WORK FOR THEM!
DID YOU EVER CONSIDER –
ok, freeze frame.

look at this old woman.
just look at her,
leaning over the counter at you:
her eyes bulging out,
her jaw jutting out,
somehow even her forehead and nose
out,
everything out – all of her features
reaching away from her skull,
the face of a hand puppet
being pulled off a hand.
decades of hurt,
of being used
and cheated on
and cast aside,
of paying taxes
and fruitlessly voting
and deteriorating for the privilege,
a lifelong addict of the bitter pill
only to end up
here,
now,
leaning over your counter
at you,
the guy who scans and packs her shit
at her local supermarket,
believing YOU
are somehow responsible
for it all,
hoping YOU
can either validate
her wasted existence
or at least give her
another bitter pill
to chew on.
you’re the guy who scans and packs her shit

at her local supermarket:
you can barely validate yourself
so you it’ll have to be
the latter:
piss off, you bored sow, you tell her
and finally she smiles,

she smiles a pinched dotted line
of a smile
as she swallows your bitter pill
and demands to see your manager
…
now the coal eyes sparkle with gratitude
and it’s about
damn time.
off the edge
there’s always that one prick at work

who has to get all heavy
and bum everyone else out.
like when the rest of the staff are like
“finally, quittin time, let’s go the pub!”
he theorises “yeah … but THEN what?”
pointing out that alcohol is just
a destructive temporary solution,
like a right edgy philosophical poser.
it’s usually me.
now I don’t get invited to the pub.
which is just as well
since I don’t work there anymore.
the hike and the hike
after the eighth customer

kicks off
because the most popular brand
of biscuits
has doubled in price
it’s easy to go
the misanthrope route.
but I try to think of

the goodness
in the human:
I consider the NHS.
I try to remember
that there’s some barely paid trainee nurse somewhere
working her fingers to the bone
so she’s allowed to save a kid’s life one day.
I try real hard.

I try real hard
to always be aware of such things.
but sometimes
I don’t want to have to think about
dying kids
or the unappreciated angels among us.
sometimes
I just want you to
not threaten me,
you know?
Pete Prokesch
Through the Glass
Jules quit cigarettes months ago, but still allowed herself one spliff before bed, as long as the amount of tobacco
didn’t exceed the marijuana. She sat on her bedroom floor, licked the paper, pressed the joint shut and
wondered if getting high was just a roundabout way to her next cigarette. Probably. Her mom had been dead
for a full year now—too long to justify smoking about it.
Diff—her dad’s girlfriend—snored from across the hall. Jules tip-toed down the stairs, across the
kitchen, and silently slid open the patio door. The August air was cool as she sat on the cement steps in the
moon’s shadow. The linden leaves gathered above her like inverted hearts. She lit the joint and exhaled into the
gray light.
She knew no one in her dad’s town, but she’d be going to college in the fall. At least back home, in the
empty ranch, she’d hear her mom’s voice at night when she prayed. But eighteen is too young to be on your
own, her dad said. Better to stay the summer with him and Diff. Her dad dating Diff had nothing to do with
her mom’s cancer, she kept telling herself. But she never heard her mom’s voice here. And so she stopped
praying, altogether.
Back in the kitchen, Jules poured herself a glass of water from the filter on the fridge. The lights were
off, but the full moon lit the room just enough. She looked around. White couch, white cushions, white
cabinets. She never really called her dad’s house “home.” Diff did most of the decorating.
Jules picked a framed picture off the counter and ran a finger over the plexiglass. Her dad and Diff in
front of a steaming volcano in Hawaii. Diff falling in a dip, and her dad supporting her burnt body with a
strained arm. Matching sunburns and bucket hats. In feint orange print, Jules could make out the date in the
bottom right corner. The day before her mom died. Jules heard footsteps from the hall.
“Lucky for us, the volcano blew the next day.”
Jules swung around and knocked the picture onto the floor. She jerked forward, fumbled it, and then
replaced it on the counter. Diff chuckled and plucked a glass from the cabinet. The fridge groaned as it squirted
a strained stream.
Diff gulped from her glass, and Jules watched her Adam’s apple bob up and down, while the water
trickled down her neck and saturated the front of her white nightgown. In the feint light, Jules traced the
outline of a large nipple. Diff wiped her face with a forearm and raised her glass towards the sliding door.
“I know what yah doing out theyah,” she said.
Her intonation had changed. Diff was a doctor, but she spoke more like a plumber or a career waitress at
the diner down the street. Where did her dad say she was from? The weed weaved a web of panic around her
mind, and the moonlight hit Diff’s face, and her pupils were large and strange. The sharp corner of the cabinet
pressed into Jules’s spine.
“Reefah makes you lazy and ratahded.” Diff held her palms under the water dispenser, and the machine
gurgled out a single cube. She rubbed the ice across her face.
“You know that’s not true,” Jules began. She pushed herself upright off the counter. “You are a doctor,
after all.” Why was she debating the merits of marijuana with Diff in the kitchen at one in the morning? The
melted ice dripped down Diff’s neck.
“Don’t be a smaht ass like yah brothah,” she said. Jules inched backwards until she thought the corner of
the counter would pierce through her. She bumped the Hawaii picture again, and it fell flat on its face.
“Just don’t tell yah fathah,” Diff said. “This is owa little secret.” She showed her small teeth as if to sink
them into meat. Jules had never seen her smile—if you could call it that. Just the occasional grimace when her
dad asked her how she liked the salmon.
The next morning at breakfast Diff’s eyes were tired and small and Jules couldn’t find the pupils amidst
the gray. Without looking up from her Organic O’s, she asked Jules—if it wasn’t too much trouble—to do a
better job with the dishes. This was the second morning in a row that she came downstairs and found a dirty
glass on the counter.
*
Jules was sixteen when her dad got laid off from Boston College Law school and took a job at a corporate firm
in Phoenix. At dinner, her mom begged him to take his old job at Boston Public Defenders. He pushed his fish
from one side of the plate to the other and shook his head. It wouldn’t be the same.
To Jules, her dad wasn’t the same. He was in the basement when she got home from softball,
determined to finish his remaining workload in his final two weeks. His beloved compost container was empty,
and Jules found potato skins and banana peels mixed in with the trash. Rabbits feasted on his tomatoes in the
backyard, and he didn’t bother nailing off the chicken-wire to the fence posts. He’d lay on the couch and watch
the Red Sox west coast games until one in the morning. Jules would hear the murmur of the TV at night and
slip downstairs for a glass of water.
“Who’s winning?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” His eyes were wide, and his glasses reflected the flicker of the screen. “I wasn’t really
paying attention.”
The next afternoon, Jules pitched a shutout and scanned the clapping crowd for her parents. When she
arrived home, her mom and dad sat silently across from each other at the kitchen table, a bottle of chardonnay
between them.
“Your father took a job in Phoenix,” her mom said. Her dad examined his nails and bit a cuticle.
“I think it’s best for the family if—” Jules’s mom shot him a look. Jules felt the weight leave her body,
and she leaned back against the wall.
“This is where I’m working,” her dad said.
“That is your choice,” her mom said in a hushed whisper. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, poured
herself the remaining wine, and took her glass into the living room.
A month later, Jules watched from her bedroom window as her dad crammed a final duffel bag into the
backseat of his Ford Focus. The packed car nearly scraped the pavement under its weight. Her mother stood in
the driveway with her arm’s crossed, as the white car groaned into reverse, out of the driveway, down the street,
and disappeared below the horizon.
Jules peeled her face away from the window and observed her breath’s fog on the glass. She pressed her
palm into it, then watched its impression disappear.
Six months later, when Jules’s mom started chemo, she would ask Jules not to tell her father about the
cancer. She didn’t want him to feel trapped.
*
The next night Jules was low on weed so her spliff was two-third tobacco. Still not a cigarette, she thought. It
was past midnight and still no sound of Diff’s guttural snoring. Jules slid out of her bedroom, and silently
shuffled across the wood floor. She grimaced with each creek of the steps and kept her weight on her heels.
Outside, it was unseasonable cold for August. Jules wrapped herself in a hug and rubbed warmth into
her goose-bumped arms. She tested her breath, but only saw the inverted hearts of the rustling leaves.
She sat with her back to the house, and above her left shoulder she could glimpse the profile of the guest
bedroom window—her bedroom window. The glass expelled white light from the overhead that Jules never
used. She preferred the soft yellow from the lamp.
The moon was still full and the wispy clouds created an opaque haze in the sky. Jules squinted, lit her
joint, then took a puff. The weed must have gathered towards the middle, because the first hit was pure
tobacco. She leaned back into the wood shingles and the clouds parted like curtains to reveal a full moon—
barely waning—the top corner eclipsed by night.
A light shone on the trunk of the tree, and Jules glanced up at her window. It now flickered between
yellow and white. Jules rose to her feet and puffed again, overcome by a heavy hit of weed. The skunky taste
made her cough. She muffled her mouth in her sleeve and slipped into the shadow next to the steps. When she
looked up, the room was dark. The subtle flair between the shingles and foundation pressed into her spine.
Back in the house, the kitchen was empty—except for a single glass-cup next to the sink. The hardwood
floor caught the light and looked waxy and wet. Jules leaned on the counter and counted her breaths. Her mind
raced back to her mother’s wake—pacing in front of the casket before guests arrived. Then the door opened,
and the first face she saw was Diff’s.
“He brought her to the fucking wake,” she said to the empty kitchen. The fridge gurgled and churned
and replenished itself with ice.
Jules inspected the glass. Water dripped down the inside walls and it felt icy and cold. She placed it in
the sink. Then she shuffled her feet upstairs, the steps creaking as the wood compressed in the August air.
She paused in front of her dad’s room and heard his soft breath. Then the gargles and snarls from Diff.
In her bedroom she flicked on the surgically bright overhead-lights and scanned the bare walls. Her dad begged
Jules to decorate the room—her room—but she insisted that she didn’t want to unpack before college. She
flicked off the light, felt the smooth floor switch to rug, then climbed into bed. The blinds were shut, and Jules
plugged her ears to drown out Diff’s snores.
*
Two weeks before Jules drove her mom to hospice, she opened an email from her dad. He took a job at Boston
Public Defenders and was moving back east, and he’d like to meet for dinner. Besides the occasional email, Jules
had all but stopped speaking to him. She visited him for two weeks in the summer after junior year, and he took
her to hit balls at a driving range. He golfed now. After one bucket, she was drenched in sweat. Back at his
gated complex, she changed into a suit and dove into the pool only to find it lukewarm from the dessert heat.
“What’s new with your mother?” he asked her, as he handed her his wet towel.
He was moving in with his new girlfriend, the email said. A doctor named Dafni.
Jules met her dad at a stuffy Fusion-Bistro restaurant in Boston. He ordered wine, and the server poured
a taste of merlot. He swirled it against the glass, stuck his face in to gather aroma, and smacked his lips after the
first sip. She asked for the tofu curry, and grimaced as her dad ordered the veal. Her mother never allowed red
meat in the house.
“I love Diff,” he said, as his veal arrived. “In a lot of ways, we’re more compatible than your mother and
I.” He struggled to work his serrated knife through the tender meat. The server hurried over to top their glasses
with wine.
“She’s had a difficult life,” her dad explained. In her mind, Jules traced the blue veins on her mom’s
head. Her dad worked the meat into his mouth, sipped his merlot, and swished it around into one big mess. He
dabbed the corner with a napkin, staining the white cloth red. The server reappeared to pour more, but Jules’s
dad waved him off with a flick of the wrist. Jules flexed her wrist back and forth beneath the table.
“I represented a girl—a lady—when I first started at the PD’s office.”
Jules slouched in her chair.
“Abused as a kid—sexually, I mean—awful stuff.” He fished a long string-bean out of his mashed
potatoes.
“Classic case—happened over a long period of time—someone she knew—a neighbor—friend of the
family.”
Jules paused and noticed a string-bean that had slipped into her tofu curry.
“Anyway, they picked her up, for possession—unconscious in front of Boston University Medical
School. A student. Could probably explain dope better than you or me.”
Jules lifted a finger towards the server, now leaning his elbows on the bar. He nodded and retrieved a
new bottle of Merlot off the top shelf. She worked on the tofu cubes—neatly cut and seared with a thin, sesame
crust.
“I got her off. A small case, but my first win.”
Jules picked a sesame seed out of her teeth.
“She wrote to me years later. She was a Chief Oncologist. One of the best in Boston.”
During dessert, Jules prodded her lava cake while her dad powdered the froth of his cappuccino. After
he paid, the hostess helped him into his long, black pea coat. Outside, the wind whipped around the vacant lot.
In the car, the roads were empty and dark and the dim headlights lit mere feet in front of them. Jules’s
dad flicked on his high beams. The next day she’d be driving her mom to hospice.
“I think our house can feel like home,” he said, as he lowered the volume on NPR. They were asking for
donations. Jules climbed out of the car in front of the red ranch.
“Give your mother my best.” She waited for the familiar groan of the Ford, but the Tesla purred in
silence, and vanished like a cat down a dark road.
Jules looked at the house and saw the light was on in her mom’s room. She lit a cigarette and looked up
at the sky. It’s cruel that stars still flicker, she thought, long after they’re dead.
*
The next night Jules was out of weed and pulled her pack of cigarettes off the top shelf of her closet. Dim light
spilled in from her dad’s room in the gap between the door and floor.
Tonight was colder than the last, and she found a hooded softball sweatshirt with her fall clothes, still
boxed up for college. The rain patted down on the roof—a few isolated slaps—barely noticeable. Then the
drops erupted into a full onslaught, like heaps of rice spilled over the roof. Jules eyed the loose cigarette sitting
on her bed and frowned.
She walked over to her window and raised the blind. Then, she flicked off the lamp. The light left the
room like a vacuum. The storm clouds were thick, but the moon managed a gray haze that draped over the yard
like a blanket. Through the rain, Jules could see the hint of the moon concealed in the stormy sky.
The wind tore through the linden and ripped broken-hearted leaves and sucked them up and over the
house. Jules lifted the screen and opened her lighter, but the wind bent and killed the flame. She lit inside, then
flung her head out the window and into the storm, exhaling smoke. The wind whipped the rain under the roof’s
eaves in sharp slaps that ricocheted off her face, amidst the tobacco’s sweet relief.
She looked down to shield her eyes and noticed a white figure sitting on the cement steps, knees bent,
hands firmly pressed on her knees. It was a woman—neck straight—eyes fixed firmly ahead as the rain poured
down. Perplexed, she sucked the cigarette and peered closer. Jules’s body hung out the window, past the roof’s
eaves, hair drenched in rain.
The person—the woman—wore a dress—a gown—so soaked that she looked naked—drenched in milk.
Her head slowly rose towards Jules, as if pulled by a string. She flashed her marble eyes.
Jules recoiled and slammed the window sash and heard the sharp crack of glass. She sat, her back to the
wall beneath the window, and panted. Mucus and rain coalesced on her lip. She flicked on the yellow lamp and
then yanked the plug from the outlet. A spark flew from where the water came in. She pressed her hand down
on the floor and felt a sharp sting and then heard the wet sizzle from her crushed cigarette.
The wind raked water over the windows that washed the glass in waves. The rain persisted. Jules turned
and knelt, peering over the sill. She glanced down at the patio. A mess of broken branches and leaves where
Diff was perched moments before. Had she dreamt it? Jules glanced at the wet tobacco smeared on the floor.
She wasn’t high—she knew what she saw. She thought of the ice and the glass and the marble eyes and began
to shake.
Then she thought of the wake when the priest opened the casket. A waxy face and a wig of hair. This is
not my mother. Then moments later, Diff crossing herself and peering in.
The pelting rain slowed then ceased. The wind let up, the clouds thinned, and the moonlight cast the
sky a darkish purple. Thunder rumbled in the distance and then was gone.
*
Jules sat alone at breakfast the next morning and dribbled sriracha over her hard-boiled egg. The sun had
climbed above the trees and poured light across the kitchen table. She cut through the egg with a serrated knife,
and frowned when she found that the yolk was green. From upstairs, she heard a rhythmic snore. The recessed
lights vibrated and shook. Heavy footsteps danced back and forth across the ceiling. The sriracha was hot and
sweet, but the dry yolk made her gag.
The shaking ceiling stopped and Jules cautiously sipped her coffee as she inspected the white plaster.
She heard slow, methodical steps down the stairs—each one followed by a heavy thump. Then a single creak
from the floorboards in the hall. Jules rose out of her chair and walked to see.
Diff lay crumpled in a corner next to the front door, barricaded by her large bags. She turned and looked
up at Jules with sad, pleading eyes, as she cowered towards the wall. Her mouth quivered in a muted sob.
“Enough!” she yelled at Jules. Her face was scrunched and contorted and her eyes were small and the
whites were red. “I’ll tell my brothers. Please!”
Jules stepped back, one hand over her heart and one extended out towards Diff. Her dad stood on the
stairs—eyes wide and glassy—and he crossed his arms and stared. Then Diff leapt to her feet, abandoned her
bags, and swung open the front door. She fished her keys from her pockets as she stumbled down the steps.
Jules watched her open the passenger door and dive across the center console to the driver’s side. Her dad,
broken from his trance, spilled down the stairs and out the door as the Lexus engine whined and sputtered to a
low growl. Jules stood in the doorway and watched. There was no wind in the air, and the sky was bright and
blue.
Her dad made it to the far side of the car, and Jules watched them both through the tinted glass. He
leaned in through the lowered window, holding a sobbing Diff in a half hug while his other hand gripped the
wood-grained wheel. From across the driveway Jules heard a rustle in the bush.
A large tabby cat emerged from a hydrangea with a white bird in its mouth—teeth gripping the soft
breast—stained red with blood. The cat looked up at Jules as the wings flapped in spastic spirts. Then they
stiffened and fell—sudden and still. The cat lay the still bird on the grass by its paws and looked up at Jules.
Suddenly the bird was shocked to life and convulsed and jumped and flapped and the cat screamed and
Jules ran across the driveway to shoo the cat away. Her father’s yells were muffled by the engine’s sudden roar.
Jules turned around, and the sunlight shot through the windshield and glistened off of Diff’s large, black eyes.
Her thin lips showed no emotion. Jules dove to the ground and the pavement felt hot on her bare arms.
The roar of the exhaust was deafening as Jules lay on her back and looked up as the heat from the car’s
metal undercarriage kissed her face. The moment slowed as Jules traced the tail pipe’s path like a hissing snake.
The sun was bright when it found her, but it didn’t hurt her eyes. In a neat circle, it flickered between white,
black, purple, yellow, and then white again. Tires shrieked in the distance.
*
Jules had driven two hours on the Mass Pike towards Syracuse when she shivered in the cold air and rolled up
the window. She remembered her box of fall clothes in the corner of the bedroom. She turned off at the next
exit, and headed east towards Boston.
The night before she left for school Jules’s dad made her a seafood dinner. Jules reminded him that she
was a vegetarian, but at least it wasn’t meat. They sucked down fresh oysters, and drank champagne from flutes,
while sword fish steaks smoked on the charcoal grill.
At the table, after her third glass of champagne, Jules looked up at her father. He smiled back at her as
he chewed the charred scales of the fish. Jules decided she wouldn’t press charges if Diff received proper care.
And her dad would never see Diff again.
Back in the driveway, Jules could still make out the skid marks from Diff’s burnt tires. She traced the
scab on her arm. The linden tree towered over the house, and its top leaves yellowed with the first hint of fall.
Jules tried the knob on the front door, but it was locked. She tried again, and heard a parade of scampering feet.
Then she rang the bell.
Jules’s dad opened the door and she followed him as he back-pedaled down the hall and into the
kitchen, bumping into walls. She took a glass from the cabinet and poured water from the fridge. It groaned
and spat out a single cube.
“Needs servicing,” he said. He shuffled his feet over a wet spot on the floor. Jules approached the sink
and filled up a glass. Then she heard a shatter from above. She looked up at the plaster ceiling, then at her
father. He examined his wet socks on the floor.
Jules opened the door to the garage and observed the white Lexus nested between the concrete walls—
head light smashed and the front bumper dented in. Then she walked back to the kitchen.
“I think that if you called before you came—” he said.
Jules considered her box of autumn clothes before walking out the front door and into the driveway. Her
pounding temples muted her dad’s calls. She shifted into reverse and recalled her father’s old Ford, groaning out
of the driveway, watching him leave through her breath’s fog on the glass. In her rearview she saw him standing
in the driveway, white shirt neatly tucked into khaki pants, arms folded over his chest. She looked over her
shoulder and saw him clear as day.
Peter Mladinic
Unsolved Mystery
A kid lived in Baltimore, the early 1990s.

His mother fatally overdosed on heroin,
his father gave him to the kid’s aunt,
who lost him. His name was Roland.
The aunt neglected him. You might say
Let’s see it. All I can say, she was absent.
It’s hard to see him opening a fridge
and finding it empty, hard to say what
he did for food, or to see him waking up
on a mattress on the floor, or dressing,
or out with friends. He had no one.
He likely got strangled by a predator.
You’d like to think he’s alive but likely
he died before age 12. He had nothing.
Have you ever looked in the eyes of
someone who has nothing? I haven’t.
The predator’s hands on Roland’s throat
to keep him from telling, the fear in
Roland’s eyes, then his blank eyes—
I only know he disappeared.
Humpback
When I was a little kid, my friend’s father

had a stash of girlie magazines with all
these beautiful centerfolds. Yet he himself
was humpbacked. I’d see him, as I am now,
in my mind, and seeing his humped back
I instinctively want to turn away. He kept
the girlies in a cubbyhole, off the bathroom.
His stash of lust: Dude, Nugget, Daddy,
Uncut, Handjobs, Kingsize, Sex Life. All
we did was look; this was before puberty.
He wore a grease-monkey suit, he owned

an auto upholstery shop, he was Polish,
his name was Adoph. The suit was dull
silver with dull blue lines I see up around
his humped back, blue lines that splayed
out like finite fishbones, of fish fossils
embedded in rock from prehistoric times.
His egg head, bald on top, flat in back,
must have been crammed with cleavages,
that deep line between breasts he fondled,
kissed, sucked and bit while jacking off.

Nothing wrong with that. He was married,
had two kids and a successful business.
He lived in a house on a hill, wore dark-
framed glasses. His skin was light brown,
even his bald head, wisps of black hair
on the sides. His face, wide and drawn,
seldom smiled. Though he was outgoing,
inside he was private, the Adolph even
his wife, Adele, didn’t see, is my thought.
(continued, stanza break)

No one around, he visited pics of girls
buxom, hot to trot during the Cold War.
He stroked to a pic in Sin: a young woman
knelt, her mouth around a big hard cock
and cum dripping, the private Adolph.
The Sundays he went to mass were rare,
but he did go. I’m not sure if he walked
a path in woods that led to the river
and stood on the riverbank and looked
at the weeping willow on the other side,
the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen

that wasn’t in a photograph. I wonder if
he ever saw it. He was always working,
either at his shop, stitching upholstery,
needle in hand, or at home, a hammer,
a saw, or the spirit level—dull silver,
like a heavy ruler, in the center a yellow
liquid bubble—he used to build shelves.
He spoke in low spurts, like snores.
The women in his girlie stash loved him.
Reciprocity
I want a can opener that has a beak

like a hawk’s, that I can push into the lid
of a can of pineapple juice, and see
the hollow triangle like an upside down
baseball diamond.
I want a chimney, a path through elms,
a negligee pinup, and a smoking jacket
that’s silk and lightly padded and has
little diamond-shaped patterns, a lapel
with long curves, and a silk belt that goes
through loops, that I can either leave
hanging loose or tie. I want a picture of
Rita Haworth in a pillbox with a veil
that falls past the bridge of her nose.
If you help me get what I want I’ll help

you, Ethel, one of the dead,
cold in your grave, wanting everything.
The yellow eggcup you made in the shape
of a duck has green wings. Its webs and bill,
a light orange. It’s on my sill.
As you primp your permed hair in a mirror
in your brick house on a hill,
I could gather orange and grapefruit rinds
to bring to your compost, I could wax
your green Plymouth. I saw your husband’s
mother, but never yours.
Did you live in a house on a hill after you
moved from the house I remember?
You picked me up from school one day
in your Plymouth. Its interior, light gray
smelled damp. I could put an egg
in the cup you baked in a kiln.
Blue Jacket
Abby Williams and Libby German, respectively ages 13 and 14, were close friends, and victims of a double homicide
that occurred near Delphi, Indiana, in 2017.
Can you ever stop chattering about news,

weather and, What did you have for lunch?
and look at Libby and Abby, Their faces
in pictures resemble wanted posters. Their
bodies below the Monon bridge near Delphi.
Except what you’ll see is the railroad ties
of the bridge, that one picture with Abby
on the bridge, then the one of evil incarnate
in a blue jacket, a hand in his jeans pocket.
You’ll hear evil’s voice: Guys, down the hill.
You won’t see Libby and Abby after evil took
their lives, you’ll see the tilted winter trees
and leaf-strewn rocky ground. Mostly it’s
the bridge, high, long, splintery, rickety
the girls walked, and evil followed, and led
them down the hill. You’ll see no weapon,
you’ll not know cause-of-death. The cops
know but are not releasing that, not yet.
Evil resembles a man who is white, either
young or early middle-aged. A hood
under the jacket is up by his neck. He has
a full head of hair, a hand in one pocket.
You’ll see and hear evil, see Abby in a pic
Libby took, who recorded evil’s voice. Her
video hints evil had walked the Monon
High Bridge before. It’s thought evil lives
in Delphi or nearby. You’ll see steep hills,
trees that look like sticks and thicker trees,
all minus leaves. The ground strewn
with rocks and big brown leaves, mostly
you’ll see the high, narrow, rickety bridge.
It looks scary to people afraid of heights.
Albert Place
In the face of not knowing what to expect

we’re weak though we try to be strong.
Albert Place was shaped like an S.
Dense trees made a dark green dome.
On my bicycle I looked at a yellow
ambulance in front of a small brick house.
Joanne lived there, her father’s final hour,

whirling red top of the ambulance.
I pedaled onto that street, turned left
and rode down South Park Drive
onto North Park Drive. On TV Clark Kent
ducked into a washroom, took off
his specs and loosened his tie’s Windsor.
Look! Up in the sky! Superman

walked through walls, stopped a maniac
launching a missile, never doubted
a thing, got on with most everyone.
You and me, bending to tie a shoelace
and it breaks, that wasn’t him.
In Valley Hospital Joann stood crying.
Her mother’s arm drew her near.
Ric Carfagna
from Sequences
-XL-
And this prophetic knowledge

in a transitory world
a dimness before my eyes
a philosophy’s simple wisdom
wrought a similar transformation
dissolving the solitary musings
in the depths of every heart
but to predict a destiny
wandering down
through a common center
the crowd’s hollow
roaring voice
one after another through the street
and none to mistake
the meaning now
a preternatural insight
a forsaken world’s common fate
.
.
.
-XLI-
These sense-realties
strangely illuminate
a metaphysical duality of things
through organic sensibilities
corporeal degeneration
threadbare glances of a stranger’s eye
to postulate
a broken unity
a separateness
a reality-dissolving
auto-intoxication
everything empirical
and finite
.
.
.
-XLII-
A man waking in a fog

always has existed
without an echo
dissolving
every concrete moment
however inferior
and perishable it may seem
.
.
.
-XLIII-
My impression
leaves
these other forms
to stimulate
a flesh and blood conventionality
and if one cannot find God
one sees
the grass of Eden
infinitely more so clear
as one
transparent
conscious moment
.
.
.
-XLIV-
There is no reason
to save the world
as one may call it
fundamentally irrational
to create
two smaller chasms
and fall into
hopeless contradiction
as in those passing moments
cut into numbered instants
elements of movements
conceptually at work
in a detached view
defying the increments
of a whole universe
of life lived
together
.
.
.
-XLV-
The last remnant

was the first man
his inward vision
gradually awoke
from dust
hedged off with thorns
somewhere
his continual wandering
became dumb and evanescent
entering into
a reality
of immense volubility
with a quickened spiritual sense
to the humanized mass
drawing nearer
to the lower region’s
confinement to insanity
.
.
.
-XLVI-
The same universe

she defines herself
unconnected
to the world
and the mind
therefore
emaciated
to the whole
of the human situation
and any moment of ordering
itself
being of small comparative value
without proximity
to the same universe
she defines
so shadowlike
and unreal
.
.
.
-XLVII-
Another flight of stairs

in the midst of the house
perhaps essential
to understand
deeper realities
as a shifting of universes
perceived among shadows
of the hall
and here one can choose to envision
innumerable grains of sand
to be meaningless in significance
or deny the identity
of hidden molecules
denoting only
subjective aspects
framing an imaginative representation
yet what can be discerned
of corporeal objects
of a carved balustrade
to be found within
a defining line of time
from one epoch passing
into another
from what remains
when conclusions fail
to illuminate
the great obstruction
pervading human apperception…
.
.
.
-XLVIII-
With us
sentient creatures
in a world of objects
it would be vain searching
near the hour of death
as the condition is immaterial
to our doctrines of evolution
to our external world
to our logic of identity
as there are a thousand shapes
to the moving present
spatially inarticulate
natures of reality
figures appearing
now aware
of doorways open
inner essence
crossing the threshold
.
.
.
-XLIX-
The doorway remained

finite in our understanding
discontinuous
and comprehensible only
within human sympathies of doubt
by a mode of emotions
and presentiment’s glow
yet the patterned aspects
pervading natures of the concrete
quantum prejudices
providential indeterminacies
a hand pointing downward
to atomized objects
made vacant by vacillating aspects
fleeting as gaslight vanishing
through the narrow doorway’s arch
.
.
.
Roger Craik
COMMANDER V. EXPLAINS
It’s a Special Operation.

It’s a Special Operation
because it’s a Special Operation.
Not a war. That’s all. Stop asking questions.
It’s a Special Operation.
AMERICA
I saw—I saw four cows go sailing past

on a truck that said that yellow jugs
are best, yes yellow jugs are best!
Each one, to a man, had seized this day
to rise to her kind legs and quaff
the milk that comes in yellow jugs.
Such jolly, happy things

with water-melon noses,
each one proffering her glass to me
as they went sailing past.
Epitaph
If last time you came you left a stone

Upon my grave, and this time find it gone --
Kicked off, you guess, into the unmown grass --
Or if, to your distress, the jar that reads
Frank Cooper’s Thick-Cut Oxford Marmalade
Has spilled its flowers that, shrivelled up, lie strewn
Beneath the legend you had carved of me
Against your own mistrust, attend to this.
The grave that you presume of me now serves

For couples clutching twenty minutes’ life
From daytime’s striplit falsifying hours,
Or for the pensive child who likes the stones,
Who rather likes the dead, as I did once,
And friendless wanders through these tussocked plots
And learns although he does not know he learns
A private catechism chronicled
Of names and dates and middle names
And four lines at the most of mundane verse
And things that people said a person did
Within a short and agitated space
Between two massive walls of nothingness.
But most of all it stands here for the boy

In blazer, shirt and regulation tie
Who, fleeing from the school gate’s iron-tongued clang
Reverberating through his arm and spine,
Hurtles headlong, full tilt at my stone
And leapfrogs over by his fingertips
As if by jumping he could leave the earth
And fly, exuberant, beyond the sun.
ENGLAND
Cow in a pond
up to its shoulders in the afternoon.
CLEANING DAY
The place that used to call itself

Angelea’s
(Patsy tells me, over a cigarette, getting
over-excited – she’s already got
Smith Field and Massucci’s Field
thoroughly confused, and me)
is now called something else but I’ve been there and
Roger do you know what?
(she adds, marsupial-eyed)—
they’ve got a liquor license
and Tammy says that people drink
at six o’clock in the morning!
FRANK IN A FURY
Like a button bursting off a fat man’s coat

he went bomberjacketbarreling through
both sets of glass and aluminum doors
and out across the parking lot and in one movement poured
himself into his car and snorted off—
(I thought that there were other cars around

this time of day with people going home
and he could have to brake for them,
thus tempering his storming-out’s effect.
I even said as much to Sharon as we stared,
adding that he must have had
an up-and-downer with the Dean
whom I and everybody else called Chubbs)—
straight down the college drive and out of sight.

WIN ALL ROUND
“Two English guys

are teaching a Spaniard dirty words.”
Which is to say,
sniggering at the dirty words
and laughing at the Spaniard

for being a Spaniard.
MIKE REMEMBERS
Most of the days you never remember,

but me and Tim and Rog were out on this deck we’re standing on
and Tim had this old-ass 20-bore shotgun with iron sights
and he was trying to get it sighted up,
so him and me started shooting at seagulls
and me and Rog were drinking beer
for hours, man, hours, all afternoon, and it was
November, and sunny as shit.
We must’ve gone through 500 rounds and never hit
a fucking thing, never once got near
a thing and there was this big-ass boat right out on the lake.
I’m sure they were watching us.
It was illegal as shit.
It was great.
GOING BACK
Towards the end

he started to revert.
Words were grey.

A book of words was blocks of grey.
There were no pictures in it.
Pictures were better than words.
LEWIS
It’s been two months since the divorce.

He keeps himself attentive, exercises,
embarks on solitary restive walks
without the dogs. They’re hers,
or so she said. He acquiesced.
I phone him fairly regularly,

admiring how he keeps his spirits up,
and saying so. Of late I’ve noticed how
he’s adopting, though perhaps he doesn’t know,
the language of a man who’s now alone.
He’ll tell me that his daughter Kim

(She’s fifteen and plays twelve-string guitar)
and his son, who’s started school at Notre Dame
will over Christmas want to spend some time
with “their mother.” He isn’t sure exactly when.
Can there be words for this,

this slippage into silence of her name,
let alone the other words, the tender words,
known only to them both, each one:
the words he’ll never say to her again?
MARRIED TO THE FAMILY
busy morning
doing nothing
wife and sister

talking talking
2:15
lunchtime
talking talking
talking talking
all afternoon
doing nothing
Roger Singer
ONCE A SUMMER
the song
of autumn
circles the
closing of
the cottage
as I remember
sun warmed shirts
a soft morning foot
into a slipper
misplaced towels
pockets with sand
and night walks
into relaxed air
where quiet shadows
gazed upward
past sleeping birds
and owls speaking
of “who”
to a star
I know by name
OUR NAMES
cloud shadows
silently pass
over your eyes,
brushing out
the winds of
unanswered
prayers
as reflections
of us
drift down
from above
onto paths
where rain
cannot quench
the fire of
our words
from the years
of tides
lifting to
the surface
our names
PASSING SHADOWS
Shadow #1
the fault of grace,

the elevation
beyond believed
into the uniqueness
of forgiveness
full and completed
Shadow #2
uncertainty
pauses within
hidden layers
of fear and
disappointment
secured in
the middle of
always between
Ryki Zuckerman
wildfire
the old trees burning,

trees that had been spared
when other trees
were cut down for lumber
to build houses
where humans could inhabit
and spoil the forest habitat
by sending sparks into the air,
rushed to four corners
by santa aña winds
named after a mexican general,
part of whose country was annexed
to become california.
yes, yes, it was so dry,
water forsaking the area
climate in a strangle hold.
let's burn something anyway.
barbeque, burning coal made from trees.

the elder woods hear the cries
from babies of the old growth,
their anguish muffled by the booming sound
of electric saws and lumbering trucks
bringing the slaughtered
to be stripped of their skin
and sanded smooth.
wildfires whipping up the blaze,
burning down the multimillion dollar homes
of owners who thought themselves protected by wealth.
a flare for style extinguished.
this tract of land now available at cut-rate prices.
wildfire. dancing around the campfire

wild abandon, smoky gaze from across the embers,
embers of youth smoldering,
smoldering glances from him to her. and her to him.
the fire burns wildly. the night is young.
how to clean an old silk lampshade
pack the shade carefully

wrapped in acid-free white tissue paper
and entwine that in fresh, non-inked newsprint paper.
fit it into a box.
silk disintegrates with time.
time disintegrates with fog.
buy two tickets to japan.
time travel to 1930 if possible.
bring the shade, of course.
pay a local guide
to drive you to the silkworm fields.
show a silk grower the shade
and ask for repair, cleansing,
reparations, or new silk.
pay in silver coins.
repack and reverse your time machine.
return home.
avoid bringing the silk grower back
with you, especially to WWII era,
where she will be sent to an internment camp
but will first understand your previous reparation offer,
too late and too little.
avoid the late 1880s if you are a handsome white naval office
and the silk grower is a shy, beautiful butterfly wearing
a silk kimono, walking behind you
with small steps, eyes cast down.
or fill a vat in 2020 with mild, soapy, lukewarm water,
dip the shade in, swish, then rinse gently
with the tears of a geisha girl.
dry with repeated pressed flowers and thick towels
from the turkish bath you stopped at
on your way back
from the far east,
on your way back from the filamental past,
on your way to the light
emanating from the lamp
underneath the silk shade.
Shelley Stoehr
Girls! Girls! Girls!
Shelley Stoehr
In the early 1990's, when I told people in New York City that I was moving to San Francisco, the sentiment I
heard most in return was, "I could never live where there are earthquakes." The second most frequent response
had been in the form of a quote, purportedly from Mark Twain: "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer
in San Francisco." So, like everyone else, I layered my clothing, especially in the summer, to accommodate days
that might range from a brisk 50˚F in the early morning to a near-balmy 75˚ in the afternoon, then drop down
to the low 60's at sunset, and finally continue through the night at around 50˚ again.
Raising the collar on my jacket to cut the chill of the night breeze, I looked up at the marquee: Girls!
Girls! Girls! it read in bright lights, like the lyrics from that old Mötley Crüe song.
Inside, I let my eyes adjust to the dark for a moment. I approached the counter. Though I was new to
San Francisco, I knew how things worked. Deep breath. Go!
"Hi, I'm Sheila," I said. "I'd like to audition to dance."
***
I'd graduated from college a half-year early, in December of 1990, during a severe economic recession, and jobs
were extremely scarce. As an artist—a choreographer, dancer, and writer—I had really wanted to live in New
York City—it had been my lifelong dream. And so, first determined, then desperate, I took the train in from
Long Island and walked the streets of Manhattan a neighborhood at a time, applying for restaurant work and
opportunities from the want ads. To my despair, nobody wanted to hire me, not even to bus tables. It was a
hard time to be just starting out in the world—frustrating and frightening. My college major had been in
modern dance, so I even tried to make my living street dancing, setting up a boom box alongside an open guitar
case (for tips) in the Times Square subway station.
The concrete ground was cold and filthy with the residue of thousands of feet, and the smell of urine
was everywhere. As I danced, my pink ballet slippers turned gray. One woman stopped and told me that what I
was doing was beautiful, and occasionally, someone would drop money into the guitar case, but to most
passersby, I was just another crazy person in the subway station. Nonetheless, I was determined not to give up
and continued dancing. The cold and damp seeped through my thin tights and leotard and settled deeply into
every bone. The pee smell was part of me now.
In the end, I left after two excruciating hours with a sore body chilled through and only about $20 in
earnings for what had been very hard physical effort, not to mention the courage it had taken to be that publicly
vulnerable in the first place.
I took the subway to 34th Street, where I would walk to Penn Station to catch the train back to my parents'
house on Long Island. The racket of the car bumping and rumbling over the tracks provided a rhythm for the
pep talk I was giving in my head—don't cry, it's not a big deal, you're fine, don't worry, you can do this, you can
handle this, you're not a failure, this isn't the end of the world, please don't cry!
When I came up from the subway at the intersection of Broadway and 33rd Street, I had no idea what to
do next. I would never be able to support myself. I was a loser and a failure. But as I turned away from the wind
to light a cigarette, I noticed a neon sign on a building to the east that I'd never seen before, probably because
I'd always turned west toward Penn Station when I got off the subway. I crossed the street to get a closer look,
and there on the door was another sign: "Dancers Wanted." Without pausing to think about it—because that
might have stopped me from doing it—I pulled open the door.
To my joy and horror, I got the job.
The next night, I showed up with the best costume I could come up with in a day—a black bra and thong, short
skirt, and a pair of knee-high go-go boots (though the heels weren't high enough to qualify as stripper heels,
they would have to suffice).
The dressing room was cramped and bright, with white lights bordering a smudged mirror full of the
reflections of faces. Beneath the mirror was a narrow counter cluttered with balled-up tissues, various makeup
tools and trays, and other accoutrements of beauty. The Formica was old and worn and dusted with cigarette
ash—nothing in the space was very clean or nice. Music throbbed just outside the door. I shrank into a back
corner, trying not to get in anyone's way or even to be seen at all. I listened. I tried to learn, because I didn't
have a clue what to expect or how to behave.

"Hey new girl," said a skinny punk with shaggy, bleached blond hair and a line of crystalline studs
climbing up the lobe and around the entire curve of her left ear, a spike in her nose.
The room buzzed with energy and the rise and fall of women's voices. I looked around, unsure.
Me? I thought. Yes, me. She means me.
"Where'd you work before?" the blond asked as she tweezed an eyebrow, friendly if a little bit mocking
in tone.
I shook my head and blushed and said, "This is my first night."
"Ever?'
Gulp. Nod.
A tall black woman introduced herself as Princess, smiled, and offered to show me the ropes. I was so
grateful for her kindness that I almost cried.
"What's your name?" she asked me, her voice low and smooth and thick like velvet.
When I told her 'Shelley,' she chuckled. "I mean your stage name," she said. Then her look darkened
and became serious. "Never use your real name here. Never let them know who you really are."
I chose the stage name Sheila because it was close enough to Shelley that if I forgot where I was and
spoke my real name—as happened several times, the first week—I could quickly correct myself and no one
would much know the difference.
That first club was a "champagne bar." We performed topless in groups of three on the stage behind the
bar, teetering on heels and with one hand on the mirror behind us for balance because the stage had a slant to it.
It was only a few feet deep, so there wasn't a lot of room to move, still, just as when I'd performed in the Times
Square subway station, I threw myself into the dancing, and that made it okay. I became all body—thrusting
hips and shimmying shoulders and goosebumps all over—with no consciousness. Plus, the lights were bright, so
you couldn't really see the audience from the stage. It wasn't all that different from dancing alone in my
bedroom (as I liked to do)—or so I told myself.
Occasionally, men would pass bills to us via the bartenders, but the stage wasn't our main source of
income. We were expected to sit with customers between sets and to encourage the men to buy us drinks, for
which we got a small cut—two dollars per non-alcoholic drink or twenty on a seventy-five-dollar bottle of fake
"champagne" (which I hoped never to be offered because I wasn't too keen on the dark, cordoned off corner in
which dancers sat with customers, supposedly only to share champagne). After my first set onstage, the punk
girl from the dressing room told me that she could tell I was a trained dancer, but that I needed to chill out up
there because the men didn't care about talent or skill, and it would be a long night. She warned me not to
waste my energy. However, when she said that, in my mind I was like, but I can't stop dancing my best because
that's how I'm going to survive this—by performing my heart out. To not do that would have meant
suppressing my favorite parts of myself—the fierce optimist, the cute and energetic artist girl, and even the
Little Toughie (a childhood nickname once given to me by a school principal because I was always hitting boys
on the head with my lunchbox.)
Although I understood the need to dissociate from one's true self to survive the nastier parts of the job, I
didn't want to be entirely someone else. I wanted to still be me. I was determined. If I was going to do this,
then the job could never change me. I would always remain the same creative, emo-but-still-hopeful, brave
young woman that I'd always been.

Soon, I had saved enough money to move to a loft in Brooklyn with my boyfriend Frank, a few doors down
from a poultry slaughterhouse from which blood and feathers flowed and froze to the road in the wintertime,
and across the street from an ice cream truck depot that injected a little bit of magic into the early evenings of
summer, when the tinkling chimes of the trucks filled the air.
I lost my job at the midtown club following an incident wherein I convinced several of my fellow dancers
to appear on shock-jock Howard Stern's TV show with me, performing in a dance I'd choreographed. We all
called in sick to the club, and I was subsequently fired. Frank was happy about that, but I was worried about our
rent and knew I'd have to find another club soon. However, because he'd been so awful about me working at the
midtown club, I didn't tell Frank that I was looking for a new place to work.
I'd recently gotten a part-time day job teaching creative dance up in Harlem, and although it was not for
much money and I still needed additional income to live on, teaching gave me enough financial wiggle room to
be more particular about the next club I worked at. After trying a couple of the bigger clubs that had been
popularized by the Howard Stern radio show and doing some travel stripping in upstate New York (yes, that's a
thing), I ended up at Billy's Topless on 6th Avenue in Chelsea. I found out that shifts there were assigned
through a booking agency's office, located in the historic Flatiron building, a 21-story wedge at the intersection
where Broadway met 5th Avenue.
The ancient elevator groaned and twitched up to the 12th floor. The booking agent had a small, dark
office that could have been a movie set for a noir detective agency—I half expected to see Veronica Lake
smoking a long cigarette in the corner. The agent himself was a short stub of a man, indeterminately aged.
Perhaps because I was so young, he appeared to be simply old. Old and mean, with tiny knobs of features
squashed onto a fist of a face. I don't remember his name or even if I ever knew it, but in my head, I called him
Golum—precious, oh my precious! He wanted me to take my top off so that he could evaluate my worth
topless. My neck prickled with embarrassment—it's one thing to take your top off while costumed and made-up
in a dark club, but quite another to expose your breasts in some old dude's office in the middle of the day. But I
bit back my shame and did it.
The agency took me on, but I didn't get a shift at Billy's because according to the agent, I didn't have
"the look," meaning that I was too short and too skinny, and my breasts were too small. Part of me railed
internally at his blunt insensitivity and sexism, but another, deeper part took the criticism in and filed it away in
a mental cabinet where I stored a growing collection of hits to my self-esteem, not only from the comments I
received on my appearance while working in the clubs, but also out in the world. I was frequently accosted by
random men on the sidewalk or in passing vehicles calling out bold "compliments" and suggestions: nice tits,
nice ass, hey baby, sit on this, suck on this, touch this. In fact, I used to joke (without really laughing) that I was
harassed more outside on the streets of New York than I was inside the clubs—but on the street, I didn't get
paid for it. My indignation at "acceptable" judgment by the patriarchy oddly helped make the job more
palatable.
The agency sent me all over New York City for the next year. Frequently, I worked Friday nights at a bar in
Queens called the Cozy Cabin. The Cozy Cabin was the only club I remember ever working at that had a
female owner, an ex-nun (!) who would come in sometimes to check on us and make sure we weren't doing
anything too risqué—floor work was not allowed, which was the main drawback to the Cozy Cabin. ("Floor
work" was crawling on and grinding against the floor, or, if a dancer was really tired, then sitting and leaning
back with her legs spread, sometimes opening and shutting them in time to the music, but often just lazily
posing and doing as little as possible, because either there was, like, one loser at the bar with his hand cupped
protectively over his meager stash of bills, or it was three in the morning and our knees ached, our backs ached,
and it felt like there were knives stabbing through the arches of our feet.) When she came in, the owner didn't
speak to any of the dancers, but would communicate to us through the bartender as needed. If the owner looked
at us at all, it was always with a glare of disdain and distrust—as if the second she let down her guard, we'd be
gyrating all over the floor and probably having sex in the men's room. While most strip club owners are mean-
assed, misogynistic pricks, it was unexpected coming from a nun! But the bartender—a goth with shiny black
hair down to her ass—said that she wasn't surprised at all by the owner's cruelty because the bartender had gone
to Catholic school and remembered a common punishment of being banished to the supply closet with just a
pamphlet on masturbation to read. I laughed and asked what the pamphlet had been for—"to tell you what to
do while you were in there?"
Meanwhile, during the day I went to school to become licensed in massage therapy, and I continued to
teach dance to preschoolers. I studied and choreographed and performed modern dance. (I mean, that was why
I was doing what I was doing, right? So that I could afford to do art.) In addition to dancing, I wrote and
published my second young adult novel, loosely based on some of my experiences as a stripper (toned down for
a YA market), which I titled Weird on the Outside—the sentiment being that everyone has weird idiosyncrasies
on the inside, but strippers wear theirs on the outside. Much later, when I moved to L.A. after San Francisco, a
paperback copy of Weird got passed around from stripper to stripper across the city until I got it back dog-eared
and worn a year later, having been lovingly read until it was coming apart at the binding.
Frank was also producing art—photographs and paintings.
That's almost all I can tell you about Frank. I remember the events of the eight years that I was with
him, and I even remember his work—the canvasses drenched in vivid, clear colors and kaleidoscopic photo
arrays—but I don't remember him. I hardly remember anything about him, the person.
I loved him, or at least I believed I did. We did everything together. Once, we biked from Brooklyn to
Shea Stadium. Another time, we watched the sunrise on New Year's Day from the Brooklyn bridge. I
remember drinking vodka and dancing with a bar full of old Russians in Brighton Beach. We liked Coney
Island and Keith Haring, we watched MST3K on Saturday mornings, and we had a dog.
New York-Frank was mostly fine, I think. Certainly not that bad, and certainly I had a part in whatever
wasn't right. He honestly didn't become abusive until ... well, no. Or well, maybe. I do remember that shortly
before we moved to San Francisco, I was going to break up with him because he was becoming controlling and
kind of mean, but then we went on vacation together, and I got really drunk in Reno, and he convinced me to
marry him in the middle of the night at a 24-hour wedding chapel.
During the ceremony, the officiant had Frank repeat just one promise: to have and to hold from this day
forward, until death do you part. But when it was my turn, the officiant's list went on and on, and I began to
laugh, because was this for real? What a sexist jackass! When Frank glared at me, it only made my giggles
worse, and when the officiant (who'd soldiered on despite my laughter) got to the last promise—"and cleave
only unto him"—I completely cracked up and couldn't stop. I laughed through the kiss and all the way up the
aisle. I laughed until my stomach hurt. Frank was angry and in revenge, he later took a picture of me naked and
passed out, spreadeagle on the bed in our hotel room—a picture that he then put into our wedding album and
showed to two of his friends and his cousin, but I don't think anyone else.
At some point, I'd told Frank that I was stripping again (I'd softened the blow by buying him a stereo system,
so he was less angry than you'd expect). It had been taking too much energy to maintain secrecy, energy that I
was sorely in need of because the job was exhausting and wearing on me, not so much because of the sexual
element as because of the difficulty of the hustle and trying to convince customers that my body and attention
were worth a dollar. I remember listening to that Soul Asylum song, "Runaway Train": "How on earth did I get
so jaded? / Life's mysteries seem so faded" and bursting into tears. But though I was aware that I was becoming
jaded, there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. So much of my energy was going into survival that
there wasn't enough left over for me to change what was happening. I continued to do what I felt like I needed
to do, on my own in more ways than I cared to be.
Although I felt comradery with my coworkers, the booking agency kept us moving around, no doubt
intending to keep us from feeling solidarity that might have led to demands for equity. At the same time, Frank
discouraged me from hanging out with and thus befriending any of the other women, and he didn't like me
spending time with my friends from massage school, either. And so, I had no one to talk to about the more
awful parts of my work in the New York clubs, such as the elderly man in Astoria who had thrown handfuls of
coins at the stage because he wanted to see me crawl to pick up my tips, or the humorously absurd parts, such as
working at Chuck's, a dive bar in the meat packing district with a corner stage built from raw two-by-fours and
half a sheet of plywood, where shifts ran according to meat cutters' hours, from 6am till 2pm. The bullnose of
the bar had been slick with layers of fat transferred from customers' bloody aprons to the wood, and men
sometimes tipped us with fresh cuts of meat instead of dollars.
***
San Francisco. It was dark in North Beach, and I walked fast, bending up my collar against the summer chill as
I sought the Garden of Eden strip club. I remember old, unused trolley tracks in the road, a meat market with
cheese balls hanging in the window, and an Italian bakery with pastries glowing palely on display. Girls! Girls!
Girls! read the club's marquee.
It was as chilly inside as out on the street, the intent to make the women's nipples stand up and to keep
the dancers from lazing around between sets, instead of what they were supposed to be doing, that is, selling
seventy-five-dollar bottles of non-alcoholic champagne. Dancers at the Garden of Eden were only given one
day off a week and one holiday off a year—Thanksgiving or Christmas, never both.
Because of that, I didn't take a job at the Garden of Eden, but the next day, applied at the Crazy Horse
Gentleman's Club, downtown on Market Street. The Crazy Horse was new and housed in what appeared to be
an old movie theater with red walls, rows of red, drop-down seats, and a small proscenium stage with a carpeted
ramp and runway extending into the body of the theater like a long red tongue. Shiny brass railings about waist-
high surrounded the stage and ran down the sides of the ramp, which I'd later use like parallel bars to do various
acrobatics during my performances onstage. (The other women were always impressed and said that my stage
shows were cute and creative.) I watched as a tall woman with a flip of brown hair climbed the requisite stripper
pole then hung upside down, held by the clamp of her legs as she corkscrewed gracefully back to the stage floor.
Roxy was the "feature" performer, a frequent headliner whose name appeared on the marquee outside.
Meanwhile, the manager, a slim, handsome young man named Max with long curls of hair, low-hanging skater
jeans, and a sexy English accent, showed me where to change for my audition.
Nerves singing on high alert, I took up as little space as possible in the dressing room, which was
actually several rooms—one lined with gray, metal lockers such as you'd find in a gym or high school, one
surrounded by mirrors and a counter where women clustered putting on makeup, and a third room with thin
carpeting and sofas where more women relaxed and chatted, their laughter floating in the air like bubbles of
champagne. Someone had a puppy. The air smelled of hairspray and marijuana. A small slip of a half-naked
woman approached me, smiling. Paige, she told me was her stage name. She had tiny, high breasts with small
beads of dark nipples and short, black bobbed hair that swung from side to side as she talked. Paige's heavily
drawn cat's eyes glinted with bright interest. She held out a hand that I accepted and shook as if we were in an
office, not near naked in a locker room. I hadn't brought music—I'd never before worked at a club where the
dancers chose their own songs to which to perform—so Paige lent me a Portishead CD ("Give me a reason to
love you / Give me a reason to be ... a woman.").
It was midafternoon and there were few customers. The music started, the DJ called for me to go on,
and I parted the curtain, slipping out from backstage into the spotlight. This was the first time I'd danced
onstage alone—in New York and New Jersey it had always been in groups. It took a moment to adjust to the
sudden brightness of the stage, as the theater on the whole was quite dark. With red walls and red floor, it was
like being inside a giant womb. Nervous but also committed, I ran my hands over my skin, touching my breasts,
stomach, hips. Max was a dark shadow in the rear of the club, making notes on a clipboard, I assumed rating
me. (The economy was still so bad that even stripping jobs were hard to come by and very competitive.)
During the first song, I exposed my breasts, and when the second song began, I slid out of my skirt.
When the third song began, naked and ala my previous formal dance training, I took long, gliding steps down
the runway, Martha Graham style. Paige sat next to the stage while I auditioned, tossing dollars. Another
woman joined Paige, tall, with a head full of pale-yellow hair that I later learned was a wig meant to hide the
woman's more wiry, ethnic curls. I found myself smiling genuinely as I performed for them. After my set, I was
hired, and Paige and Ruby became my first friends in San Francisco.
Frank's and my San Francisco apartment was in a gorgeous old pre-war building on Hayes Street, technically in
Hayes Valley, an up-and-coming neighborhood that had been partially renewed after the Loma Prieta
earthquake destroyed a freeway overpass running through the neighborhood several years before, displacing the
prostitutes and drug dealers who'd plied their wares under it. Although we couldn't afford the gentrified section
of Hayes Valley, we found a more affordable apartment a few blocks away, across the street from what we later
learned was nicknamed, "The Pink Palace," a housing project scheduled to be torn down at some indefinite
time in the future. The Pink Palace, we'd been told, was notoriously dangerous, but it seemed pretty tame for a
housing project; its boxy, two-story buildings painted a pale pink that glinted in the sunlight like spun sugar.
However, it soon became clear that the neighborhood was anything but tame—the first time I heard gunshots, I
called the police, but when I gave my address, the dispatcher only sighed and said that they would "try to send
someone out."
The cops never came. I went back to the bed to try and wake Frank, but he was passed out dead asleep,
so I put my headphones on with music to drown out the world and cried. All I could think was that this was
supposed to be a fresh start, but already it was worse than it had been living in New York.
Within a few weeks, I stopped calling the police when there were gunshots outside. Instead, I learned to
pay attention to the cadence of the shots and following the final quick succession of shots that emptied the
gun—because they always emptied the gun—I'd shut the shades, climb back into bed, and return to sleep. If
that sounds I was hardening into someone I barely recognized—I was. But at the time, I was proud of the tough
skin I was growing, and I hadn't been wearing it long enough for it to become as dark and heavy as it eventually
did.
I became accustomed to violence not only on the street, but inside my home. One of Frank's favorite
things to do on a Saturday night was to get me really drunk and then we'd listen to music and play darts, and it
would be fine until it wasn't, and then he'd drag me down the hall to the bedroom—literally drag me. (Rug
burn on the sides of my feet the next day, my voice husky from cigarettes and booze.) He was also fond of
compelling me to have sex with him in semi-public places against my will, such as giving him a blowjob while
he drove (in a convertible on the freeway) or letting him fuck me under a blanket on a public beach in exchange
for him agreeing to pay his half of our utilities that month. But I know that Frank didn't think these things
were abusive. Rather, he thought they were expressions of his love and a commentary on how beautiful I was.
("You should be happy that I want you so much," he often said, and I could tell that he believed it.) His
insistence that it was love also made it harder for me to recognize what was happening. Even semantics would
trip me up, for example, when he said he'd pay his portion of our bills if I had sex with him, it sounded like he
was offering to pay for sex, which he felt was okay, based on my job. But to me at the time, it was a threat—if I
didn't have sex with him, then he'd allow our utilities to be shut off. Because he still isolated me quite a lot, I
didn't have a lot of outside perspective, so I internalized everything he said. It was like he was raping my mind
along with my body.
Please don't misunderstand and think that Frank was powerful or imposing. He was whiny and pathetic
and failed at everything he tried to do, shame over which may have been what made him treat me so badly. But
it also compelled me to want to take care of him and later made me question whether he was as bad as I
thought. When I finally got up the courage to leave, I felt like a terrible person for abandoning him. I was
ashamed of wanting anything better than the life we had together. But the women at the Crazy Horse pointed
out that Frank was manipulative and controlling and though possibly unaware of it, an evil shit. Nonetheless, I
was neither completely blameless nor powerless in the toxicity of our relationship. It was more that I was
confused. I didn't understand the boundaries between what was mine—my body, my desires—and what
belonged to someone else to appreciate, love, or use as they saw fit, whether that someone was Frank or a
customer in a club or just the ever-present male gaze.
There were two main cliques of women working the day shift at the Crazy Horse: single mothers working while
their young children were at school and the group of artists, students, and intellectuals with whom I hung
around. One woman was a volunteer at the public library, another a graduate student and poet, and another an
activist who'd previously worked in Africa, feeding refugee children. My closest friend, Nikita, was in business
school. Ruby was an artist, as was Paige. (Ruby made Christmas cards one year with festive watercolor penises
on the fronts and holiday wishes inside such as "Jingle Balls" and "Deck the balls with boughs of holly.") My
point is that I wasn't "slumming" at the Crazy Horse, as Frank often accused. Those women were astounding,
exemplary humans I'm proud to have known.
As immersive and formative as my experiences exotic dancing were, I was still writing, quite a bit, in
fact. I wrote and published my fourth book, Tomorrow Wendy. I reviewed young adult books for the San
Francisco Chronicle, and I was a keynote speaker at a national conference on young adult literature. I also had a
straight job as a massage therapist in a health club. Though Frank tried to keep me on a short leash, the
influence of my new friends from the Crazy Horse meant that I was spending more and more time away from
him. Nikita and I started going clubbing on Saturday nights, and Paige and I spent afternoons we had off at
Osento Women's Day Spa in the Mission district, where women-only could spend the day luxuriating in tubs
and saunas for only $7. Paige also taught me to surf.
We surfed and body boarded in Half Moon Bay, an inlet down the peninsula with calmer currents, warmer
water, and gentler surf than the beaches in San Francisco proper. The sensation when I caught a wave, of
skimming fast toward shore on my belly, riding a sheen of air compressed between the ocean and my board, felt
like flying.
One afternoon when we arrived, the ocean was too crowded for amateurs, so Paige and I sat on a squat
beach wall, ogling the cute, white-blond, tattooed surfer boys until near dusk, when the shoreline quieted, and
we would no longer bother the real surfers with our ineptitude. We probably weren't the last surfers on the
isolated beach but were just about. By the time the sun began setting, we seemed to be the only ones left in the
water. Paige rode a last wave in. I tried but missed mine.
The sun sank with unexpected speed into the horizon. Because the cove was isolated, and with no lights
along the shore to guide or comfort me, I was suddenly alone on the water in the pitch-dark. I could neither see
the oncoming waves nor the direction to shore nor even my own body, and the next several waves hammered
me until I choked on sea water. The Pacific Ocean is a beast, and the boogie board attached by a cord to my
wrist gave the ocean a large surface to grab onto, yanking my arm as if to pull it out of the socket, waves
smashing me under and over and around, and for a moment, I nearly unhitched the Velcro wristband, but
thankfully logic prevailed—Shelley, it's a flotation device. You'll need it when you drift out to sea.
Terrified, I clung to the boogie board, crying and sputtering.
"Are you okay?" said a voice in the dark, surprising me. "You look like you're in trouble."
I'd been ready to give up, to allow the ocean to do whatever it wanted to me, which was happening
anyway, might as well accept my end. The stars had risen—though, no moon—and when I looked toward the
voice, I saw the dim outline of a surfer-boy, floating on his board near me. He seemed to have come out of
nowhere. For a moment, my pride flared, and I almost said that I was fine, but again, logic prevailed, and I said
between breaths, "I don't know, which way the shore is, and I can't, see the waves coming."
The surfer-angel took hold of the nose of my board. "I'm going to point you toward shore and give you a
push when the next wave comes. Hold your breath and hang on and don't let go until you're lying on the
beach."
I nodded. He did as he'd promised, and I held on as instructed, tumbling and tossing in the waves, my
eyes squeezed shut with daring faith, until—after what seemed like a long time but probably was not—I skidded
to a stop on the sand. I was still lying there, shaking, still clutching the sides of the boogie board, when Paige
ran toward me, crying, saying she hadn't known what to do—go get help or wait for me on the shore
(remember, this was the 1990's, pre-cell phones)—Oh my god, Shelley, what happened?
I told her about the surfer who'd rescued me, and we looked for him to say thank you, but no one had
come in with me, and Paige and I seemed to be alone on the beach. Later, I'd make up a proverb to accompany
what had happened, one that expressed my hope at the time—that I wasn't going to become so hardened that I
couldn't return to myself: Every wave lets you up eventually, so just hold on and don't let go until you reach the
shore.
As had been the case at most other clubs where I'd worked previously, stage performances weren't the main
event or how dancers made their money but were more of a preview geared to get customers to later pay for
various types of other services and private dances. At the Crazy Horse, those services ranged from sitting with a
customer and talking for five dollars a song, all the way up to an $80-$100 "private dance" in a single-occupancy
booth, where hand jobs and other technically-illegal things occurred (probably not actual sex because it was the
1990's and the height of the AIDS crisis, but other than that, we all knew that some gross shit was going down
in those booths; however, the only time the police ever busted the club was when they caught the dancers
smoking indoors—go figure). Many of the services were conceived of by the dancers themselves as ways to
make more money or simply to amuse ourselves during a slow day shift. Monica, who was on methadone and
regularly had her breasts surgically enlarged, came up with "wall dancing" (you don't want to know), and Renee,
who had an impressive number of genital piercings, created a room for sex shows in which she was "fisted" (you
really don't want to know) by Erica, a lesbian who had once been with a traveling carnival and had shared her
trailer with the lion. The oddest—and most hilarious—of the Crazy Horse's entertainment options occurred in
a small room rented out by Shavonne, a belly dancer with a pet pig who used to sit at the edge of a stage in her
room with a speculum inserted in her vagina (usually with the Cranberries playing in the background: "Zo-o-
mbie, zombie-ie-ie"). Men would line up to pay Shavonne something like $50 apiece to peer through the
speculum at her cervix. Surreal!
Management didn't care which room you worked in or how much you charged—we set our own
minimums and policed ourselves. So long as you paid your "stage fee" (women had to pay $175 a week for the
privilege of working there) and showed up onstage to dance two, 10-minute sets per four-hour shift, they didn't
much care what else you did or how much customers paid you to do it. The only absolute rule—which was
enforced by management as well as us—was that men were not permitted to touch the women, not in any room
and not for any reason, in fact, men were directed to sit on their hands. It was a safety issue more so than a
moral one, but also served to maintain a power dynamic wherein we women retained some control over our
bodies and actions. Whether or not it actually was a choice, it felt like one when we were the only ones doing
the touching. Our agency made it bearable, especially when contrasted with the uninvited touches we'd
encountered all of our lives as women living under the patriarchy.
I personally never gave a hand job (or touched customers with my hands anywhere, at all—it felt too
personal) or starred in one of the many live sex shows, but I did wall dances, lap dances—all that shit. It was
survivable because my entire body would go numb. Sometimes alcohol helped with that, but even sober, I
learned to detach and leave my body. I got really good at separating from myself. Sometimes I'd see my
reflection in the mirror as I swayed and touched my hips and pushed my pelvis to within inches of some dude's
face, and I didn't recognize myself—who was that tiny girl with the shuttered eyes and slack mouth, and where
did I go?
Many years later, when I was long gone from San Francisco and long out of the sex trade, I heard a speaker who
argued that women in sex work were degraded regardless of the "lies" we told ourselves about having power or
control. I rejected the idea that I may have been a victim at my job. I thought to myself that the speaker must
not have worked in the right place, with the right women, because despite the disgustingness of the work itself,
we laughed a lot at the Crazy Horse, both at ourselves and at customers—though yes, it was a bit of a gallows
humor—and we often entertained ourselves by playing pranks on the men. For example, there was a cheap wig
shop across the street from the club that we frequented when bored, and sometimes we'd change wigs and
pretend to be someone else, a favorite prank being to switch wigs and pretend to be each other to our regulars.
(That prank was necessary to our emotional safety—regulars often treated us as if we were their real-world
girlfriends, a fantasy that made them feel safe and cared for but messed with a dancer's head. Fooling customers
into not recognizing us in different hair was a reminder and reassurance that we were fungible—thus, not real
girlfriends, nor even genuinely friends.)
Once when a man tried to get handsy, Ruby pulled off her wig to swat him with it, which ended with
the man rushing out of the club, traumatized. Another time, I swung around the stripper pole and my wig
accidentally came loose, flew off my head and through the air like some strange species of tropical bird, and
landed in a horrified customer's lap. Having been professionally trained—the show must go on—I affected a
lusty look as I slowly pulled out the bobby pins that held back my real hair, tossing them into the audience as if
it were all part of my striptease. (Look! She's naked down to her scalp!) I guess my performance worked,
because when I retrieved my wig from the customer's lap, he tipped me pretty well.
Of course, we laughed at the Crazy Horse. Being human is a funny thing.
As I've said, we also chose our own music, and sometimes the music to which we chose to perform was
in itself a joke. I was fond of dancing to They Might be Giants—"Mr. Horrible / Mr. Horrible / We're not
done with you yet, Mr. Horrible." Other times, I'd dance a sort of slow, erotic ballet to depressing Tori Amos
music—"and this little masochist / is lifting up her dress." The favorite of many of the women was the Yeastie
Girlz song, "You Suck" ("suck it hard, go dooooown baby), and my friend Nikita sometimes danced old-school
burlesque to a song sung by the local drag queen Pussy Tourette, "If I can't sell it, I'm gonna sit back down on it
/ I ain't about to give it away." Nonetheless and in spite of our kidding, if a customer was polite, generous, and
played by the rules, we were generally kind and sympathetic to their loneliness and misery (if you're going to a
strip club in the middle of the afternoon, you're not a happy guy). For day shift women, it was often our
compassion and empathy more so than our bodies that kept customers coming back.
One time while I was onstage, a regular stood up to proudly show off a tee shirt he'd made and was
wearing that had my face printed across his extra-large belly with the caption, "Cuddlesome Sheila," surrounded
by hearts. They brought us fancy chocolates and baked goods and jewelry and take-out food (bowls of ramen
and shrimp from the Vietnamese restaurant around the corner, vegetarian burritos from Cancun Taqueria) and
sometimes even things they'd made. Most were less interested in us for sexual fulfillment than for our youth and
vitality and above all, our care, so those things were what we sold most, and also what were the hardest to part
with. (In the book, Revolting Prostitutes, by British sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith, they explain that
some opponents to sex work incorrectly believe that sex without love takes something essential from a woman,
like a piece of her soul. But it wasn't sex or simulations of it that took so much out of me; it was the emotional
labor—I genuinely cared about making even my shittiest customers feel wanted, which created a cognitive
dissonance that was exhausting and sometimes difficult to mediate.)
In spite of the freedom and agency and even love for each other that we had working at the Crazy Horse, we
still had to endure a crazy, mean-assed boss. The owner, Jim, was big and cruel, an asshole and a threat who,
besides being mean, was a crystal meth addict who would stay awake for nights on end coming up with ideas to
improve business at the Crazy Horse. When Paul Verhoeven's movie, Showgirls, came out, Jim ranted that he
wanted his club to look the way that one had. (To which Paige had joked, did he mean that he wanted a club
full of actors and extras?) Often, Jim would pick up itinerant workers from a spot near the Embarcadero and
have them build whatever he'd imagined and drawn on a napkin or in the margins of a take-out menu. Once, he
had several rows of seats ripped out and replaced with six wooden circles, each about two feet in diameter and
four inches high. Ruby stood in the center of one of the platforms and announced, "Beam me up, Scotty." We
never figured out what the platforms were for, but we enjoyed watching customers trip over them in the dark for
weeks, bouncing from platform to platform like pinballs. Another time, Jim had a 20-foot-high brass stripper
pole installed. One end was secured by going down through a hole in the main stage, and the other end
disappeared into the high theater ceiling. Most of us took one look and said no freaking way, but Roxy's whole
act was on the pole. As you might guess, the first time she swung around it, the top of the pole also swung—
apparently it wasn't secured to much or perhaps to anything up above; it had been merely shoved up into the
soundproofing ceiling tiles. When the pole moved from Roxy's weight, a ceiling tile came crashing down and
broke against a customer's head. Hilarious!
In the mid-90's, a group of dancers from the Lusty Lady organized and started a union to fight for us and our
rights to salaries instead of stage fees. As commendable as that was, when the stripper union won, my friends
and I knew that we were done for. We knew that the owners—and Jim was considered to be one of the kindest
and most accommodating—were nasty as fuck and would never allow their dancers to get one over on them.
We were right. When the strippers won, requiring that we receive wages, several owners made use of a loophole
that wasn't likely legal and didn't make sense when it was explained to us—sure, they'd pay us, but that meant
that they could also withhold money against our estimated taxes, based not only on our paychecks but also on
the owners' estimates of our tips. Of course, their estimations had no basis in reality. The owners had no idea
what we earned in tips, nor did they care. Instead, they estimated how much to claim a woman made in tips so
that they could then withhold her entire paycheck and make her additionally pay out from her tips in cash.
It was time for my friends and I to move on. Paige's husband's company had grown into a multimillion-
dollar business, employing something like fifty people by that time, so she went back to being an artist and the
wife of a tech mogul. Nikita finished college and got her MBA. I separated from Frank and moved to L.A,
where I began to rebuild my life (I was still stripping and doing some dumbass, dangerous things, but I was also
beginning to re-learn who I was). Eventually, I married my current husband, had a baby, moved back east, and
started my journey toward where I am today, an adjunct English instructor at a public university—my dream
job.
There had been a book that came out when I was in high school titled All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in
Kindergarten. As I look back over my nine years as a stripper, I sometimes joke to myself that all I needed to
know, I learned in those clubs. Those beautiful, creative, strong women taught me to accept myself, to allow
that to make me brave, and how to shine in spite of the ugliness of a situation or circumstances. These are skills
that have served me well in all areas and times of my life.
That doesn't mean that I didn't suffer as well during my time in San Francisco. I've mentioned the
numbness of my body. In addition, Frank's abuse combined with my own alcohol abuse shattered my mental
health. By the time I left San Francisco for Los Angeles, I was dealing with debilitating panic attacks and
depression and worst of all, an insidious writers' block that curled around my spine and took bites out of my
soul. The trouble with compartmentalizing as I had done—to survive the lap dances at work, and the rapes or
instances of empty consent at home—is that you have to cut yourself into pieces to do it. The exploitation of my
body over time took a terrible toll on me physically as well as mentally—I had an ulcer at one point, and near
the end of my time in San Francisco, I landed in the hospital for a week with pancreatitis.
One day, as I shuffled down a hall in the indigent wing of San Francisco General Hospital toward the
smoking-porch, wearing sweatpants and a johnny coat and dragging along a pole from which hung my IV bag
and a quart-sized cup full of stomach glop attached to me via nasogastric tube, a man lying on a gurney in the
hall—bleeding, no less—lifted his head to call out, "Ooh baby, nice tits! Wanna sit on my face?" for no other
apparent reason than that he was a man and I was a woman.
I recently saw the movie, Hustlers, based on a true story about a group of strippers working together during the
economic crisis of 2007-2008 who ultimately had to resort to criminal activity to survive. I cried watching that
movie, for what those women went through (their con and criminal behavior were soul killing) and because that
could have been me—there were many times when desperation pushed me to act out of character. As hard as a
I'd worked at maintaining who I was, it was, ultimately, nearly impossible not to change into someone much
tougher than I wanted to be.
As I finish this piece, I am preparing to return to on-ground classes, post-quarantine. Sitting in my
office on campus, I ask myself, why now? What brought this story up in me now? I think it's that while the
memories have been sitting in me and percolating for a while, I wasn't ready to dive so deeply into my past—
both the traumas and the triumphs—until the pandemic, when isolation and lack of physical nearness and
community became the norm. In my loneliness, I started thinking a great deal about the communities I've been
blessed to be a part of, such as I'd experienced with my fellow dancers in San Francisco, and how unfair it has
been for me not to talk about that time and those women. It's as if I'd erased them in my mind for many years,
and in my pandemic isolation, I realized that I didn't want them to disappear. I think, then, that I wrote this
piece as an homage to them, as well as a reminder to myself that even in times of darkness and isolation—
personal or worldwide—there is hope in the community of each other.

Maybe this is too sentimental an ending to this story, and maybe you won't understand the softness I
still feel toward those years when I survived as a topless and nude dancer, despite the shittier parts. True, once
the business had hardened me, it was difficult to soften back to my true self, and I'd be remiss if I didn't say that
sex work is difficult, often devastating, and always dangerous. I had a lot of healing to do before I could move
on from the lingering effects of those difficult years. But there's a little bit of light in every darkness, and I
choose now to focus on the light that shone through the bleaker moments of those years, a light that shone
brightly in the women I was fortunate enough to encounter on my journey through the darkness, and a light
that I still carry with me today.

Sultana Raza
Ceci n’est pas un poeme1
As infinitives split into infinity,

Nouns refusons to be precisely named,
Gagging in throats of frogs, can’t be understood.
Why have verbs become immobile like flowing marble sculptures,
Or gerunds frozen like rabbits in the headlights of now?
Adjectives take an eternity to descend,
As adverbs spiral off like dandelion seeds into thin air.
Wondering what, or who to enhance/qualify,
They have failed me magnificently.
If only conditionals wouldn’t bounce between

The degrees of their temperature.
Why have particles all scattered like pollen amongst flowers?
The Present is too Perfect to last continuously.
Comparatives have become as elusive
As the pot of gold at the end of the alphabetic rainbow.
Though vowels are yodeling,
Their echoes have become too mixed up to grasp, and
Consonants are constantly contriving to stay out of touch.
Superlatives roll away most superbly
Like snowballs downhill, out of reach.
Why are figures of speech shifting like sand dunes?

Metaphors mock me like mockingbirds.
Melting like snowflakes are similes at my touch,
While staying as clear as mud on the ground.
Metonymy has deserted me, can’t be scribbled on,
While synecdoche refuses to be penned down.
Why are euphemism, and litotes elbowing for shelf space?
If only idioms didn’t tend to beat around the bush.

Why are hyperboles acting like
I’ve got a million years to compose these verses?
If only allusions wouldn’t have become too illusive to hold on to.
Has irony sunk too deep to be visible?
Has it descended to mine for iron ore?
Oxymorons are as solid as air, too intangible to really pin down.
***
1
This is not a poem
-The End-
Ceci n’est pas une nouvelle2
Will the Future Continuous be forever curling out of range?

Will the Future Perfect have retreated to an invisible isle?
Will I have been searching for the Future Perfect Continuous
for years at the turn of this decade?
Has my negative capability disappeared in the forest of my mind?
Will the context remain wooden, hiding amongst trees?
Spillengs are behawing like soks at jumble sales.

Storylines flow away, down sinuous rivers,
To merge in the collective unconscious.
One setting is eclipsed by another due to confusion,
Created by millions of buzzing bees.
Shady characters have run away with my plot devices,

While the good ones are too immersed in meditation to be disturbed.
The lively ones can’t hear anything
Above the noise of the parties they’re enjoying,
While the introverts have shut the world out,
Including me: their would be creator.
Swinging from cloud to cloud, mirth disperses it’s laughter,

Mocking my attempts at being funny,
While side characters are swallowed by unseasonal mists.
As the tip of my iceberg spouts off confessionals,

They flake off like volcanic ash.
As words dance off, helter-skelter,

I’m still waiting for a story to c_ _ _ _ _ _ _
***
2
This is not a short story
-The End-
Labyrinth Chess
Threading the needle,

(formerly owned by Cleo)
the street market
burroughed through to
the greenishly wharfish park,
hyding just one waterless loo,
with canaries blowing the whistle on
bellhops and grave lads, who go broke
playing with chance,
while fake oxen graze by the ford,
shedding strands of real hay,
as in a corner, guilds speak of
shepherding or rolling the globe
to fair Arcadia in May.
Ne compton pas trop sur notre horse,

opined the bishop archly to the king.
bank not on your ‘high’ side,
never let your guard down,
or debt could bloom and bury commoners in
shards of marble.
They should hedge their bets, but pad not too closely
between the green witch, and
the knight living in white halls.
Trying to bridge the gap between east and west ends,

ministers down Porto, slyly eyeing belles
dreaming of building towering bridges
for cumbersomely dressed
regents who tend to visit abbeys
fleetingly, as they need to bond with bakers,
for bread on the cheap side is as full of ham as
dear brick sandwiches,
before hammering out deals with smiths
for new suits to don for the coronation.
***
Note: this poem was inspired by London’s tube-map.
-The End-
Eclipsed Milli Seconds
Why the sudden hush as I turn the echoing corner into a vast hall?
Had the last visitors just disappeared down the far-away stairs?
Peopled with venerable marble,
carved into eyebrows, ear, chins, broken off noses.
Chipped shoulders, armless maidens, flexing muscles,
The entire space seemed to hold its collective breath.
As I wander amongst dreamy vases,
I spin around quickly,
But I miss seeing the young priestess adjust her veil,
Or Aphrodite stroke her hair,
Or the Nereid twitch her tail,
Or Athena raise her head by a few millimetres.
They looked like a forest of marbled bust, statues, columns,
With the last rays of the sleepy sun
burnishing them a rusted orange
Just for a few minutes, before being swallowed up
By smog-filled clouds.
As they go misty in the deepening twilight,
I hear a far-off murmur, a restless rustling,
Like winds blowing though
The invisible leaves of myth, branches of history.
Wait a minute! Did Cassandra’s statue
Just shiver with foreboding?
Was she still in mourning, even though the Trojan war
Had ended ingloriously a few millennia ago,
Through a tricky ploy?
Would Hecuba be soothed to know that
Now no one has trusted Greeks bearing gifts
For a few millennia now?
Was that spidery crack already there?
There, where Achilles’s heel rested on that urn?
Wasn’t that growing ever to slightly?
Or were my eyes playing tricks on me,
As these ancient effigies were swaying for milli seconds
Through tunnels of time.
My foot-steps echo in the vast, empty corridors,
As I take advantage of the shortage of ushers,
Or guards, or whatever they were called.
If no one was around to badger me, why rush away?
Did Pliny the Elder blink for a micro-second?
Was that a fleeting wink by Marcus Antonius?
Did that Claudius cough because I blocked his view?
Or did Artemis’s hound shift ever so slightly?
The twilight deepened,
With rhythmic rain pattering down on the glass roof.
Perhaps the staff were busy sorting out the sudden power cut.
Did the Etruscan man on the sarcophagus
Pull his eternally smiling wife just that bit closer?
Was that the wind sighing down time’s tunnel,
Or was that Erato’s harp warming up?
Did a window groan upstairs, or did Calliope’s quill
Make the tiniest of scratches on her marbled bloc?
Did that ‘crunch’ come from my shoe scraping the slippery floor,
Or Urania’s fingers squeezing her marbled globe?
I wonder if there’s an eclipse of some strange planets
Going on in another part of the galaxy?
Did that longing sigh escape from Narcissus,
As he glimpsed his own beauteous face
In the washed out window right opposite him?
But Antinous remained silent, looking down,
Keeping the mystery of why he drowned in the Nile
Folded away firmly in his far-seeing eyes.
I’m still waiting for him to smile ever so slightly,
Or to look up, just for a micro-second.
-The End-
Fusion Lunatique3
Bubbling steamlessly with

elation, at being picked by a chef with a
world famous temper, slivers of
almonds, and coconut, gingerly
roasted with nostalgic
élan, rejoice by partying with
oats in a goji berried sauce.
Fried with patience, orient dough yields

gilded stars crisp with
altruistic aspirations of
nutmeg to be
ground disdainfully with
asafoetida, black onion seeds,
caramelized cardamom, which
lead to an
over-abundance of flavors; yet
nuggets of wisdom abscond
eternally from chef's curried attempts,
while guests search in vain

for partnering with tasteful drinks.
***
3
Moody Fusion
-The End-
Succulent Capitalism
Concocting complicated confections,

culinary cognoscenti
succeed in confusing
vacuous clients,
susceptible to grazing with celebrities, and
centrifuged connoisseurs,
with complex configurations,
carried by classy garçons4
in crystalline crockery,
enough to cough up crazy cash, or
quantum cheques
for ludicrously acclamatory amounts,
while congratulating the chef
on his concise conception of
cassoulet au confit du canard enchaîn2.
***
4
Waiters
Cassoulet containing the confit of ‘chained’ ducks. Le Canard Enchaîné is also a well-known French satirical
5
weekly newspaper.
-The End-
Unpalatable
Garnished with too little patience, 

the bubbling blob of self-importance
was not altruistically
aromatic enough
to the inquiring mind 
to consume it entirely 
without any queasy qualms 
of unquantifiable disgust.
-The End-
Overpowering Fragrance
Crossing swords, 
chillies, green with red
evaporate in a centrifuged swirl, 
obliged to join forces,
conspiring to conquer former colonizers 
with tropical dreams,
pimenté6 by sunny promises.
***
6
spiced up
-The End-
Chère stagiaires7,
I advise against combining devilled and Russian eggs,

or bewildered, they will scramble away.
if prudent, keep lait russ8 away from English breakfast.
avoid Dim Sum just before maths exam.
don’t ham, up your lines, or brandish frankfurters
while auditioning in haughty Hamburg.
Try not to consume grapes after sauerkraut,

specially if trying to out-fox a vixen,
or you may end up lustfully eyeing
glazed doughnuts for illicit tricks.
If sold out, opt out of crême brulant à l’impatience9;

instead try Soufflé Légère du Raisin10
to up your patience levels,
so that you can become tolerant of glutinous rice;
which isn’t necessary to consume
while sticking happily to friends,
or too many banana fritters
may send your time skittering crazily away.
Stick to Glühwein11 with a Burger de Luxe,

if you suffer the side effects of grumpiness,
after a crusty Gromperekichelcher12 in Hasselt.
A cosy cottage in Penzance
might be the best place to consume
pannacotta with Cornish cream tea.
Life may not be as cool as cucumber, or peachily parfait,
but it’s not worth Fugue à l’Autruche13 neither.
Cordialement, Mimosa Sage
PS I’ll put you all out of your agony
By announcing that the calculation
Of the algorithms of algae growth
In cold aquariums is annulled from course.
Btw, Question 12 was about purée de panais14 in the
Ecole Culinaire de Pune15 Final Exam, not pani puri16.
***
7 8
Dear Interns Coffee made with milk
9 10
Cream burning with impatience Light soufflé made of raisins
11 12
Warm (Luxemburgish) wine Luxemburgish potato cakes
13 14
Name of a modern dish: ‘running away like Puree of parsnip
an ostrich’
15 16
Culinary School of Pune, India An Indian snack
Concassé des Concepts Cousue17
Irridiating l’épanouissement18 of the

Funky sort
Mixed with
Ondulatingly thoughtful
Cornichon au vapeur, cuit a la folie19
Estranged from its humeur moutardique20;
Dates crushed with canard confuse21,
Gain in whispering
amplitude.
Nevertheless, a sliver of
Gateaux layered with
Abricots sautée22, garnished with
Wafers of cajou23,
Iced with rose petals
Literally, and
Laterally, can
Become, with a pinch of prudence,
Eligible for
La piece de resistance24, if not
Overdone; retaining its
subtly reminiscent flavor of
Textured fiançailles matinale25.
***
17
Concassé of Stitched Concepts
18
Fulfillment
19
Steamed gerkhins done too much or to madness ( a new kind of fancy nonsensical dish)
20
Mustard-like (or sour/bitter) mood
21
Confused duck
22
Sauteed apricots
23
Cashewnuts
24
The main dish
25
Morning engagement
-The End-
William Pruitt
Miracle at St. Ann Four Screen
Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep
William Blake
The girl was in tears, the boy was walking away. The teacher gripped the girl’s arm as she glared at the
boy, as if both were culpable.
It was after school. I was coming out of the store across the street with a new pack of Topps baseball
cards when the tableaux arranged itself. I was in third grade, but these were sixth graders, suddenly dangerously
mature. The girl’s tears came from a kind of hurt that was new to me, that I felt without knowing what it was.
More than a playground spat, it had something to do with boys and girls.
* * * *
The summer before fourth grade there was a girl I couldn’t get out of my mind. I knew we would be in
the same class and I imagined Katie’s face before me, delicate upturned nose and green eyes below her bangs, a
soft light from the near future. For the first time I looked forward to being in school.
The teacher changed the seating every month and in April I got to sit behind Katie. Once I pulled on
her pony tail and she turned around slowly, brows raised, not smiling or frowning, but with pretend annoyance,
as if the beam of her eyes was a searchlight that theatrically swept her field of vision for the intruder. Next day
she came up behind me after I had gotten a haircut— a flat-top it was called then— and tapped her fingers on
top of my head a few times before she sat down. I felt extended, light-headed. Like I had goose bumps on my
brain.
* * * *
I used to go to church three times a week with my parents. There were stories of death angels, manna
from heaven, pigs gone crazy that ran off cliffs. Our preachers never asserted anything without Biblical citation.
I had a black friend whose church I went to once. Their pastors preached in chant, like God was
speaking through them in long arcs of feeling, spreading joy and warning in sung shouts, as if the Word had
been written down only till it might be freed by the human voice.
Not in our church. Our preachers spoke scripture in stylized inflections-- which included stretching
single syllable words into two-- which did not sound like speech. As if being written was what made it truth.
The NA-ume of the LO-ord, shall NOT BE TA-kun IN VA-un. Exodus Chapter 20 verse 7.
Everything that mattered was in this unwieldy box we were schlepping around they said was our soul,
inside of which a war was being waged between good and evil. The actual world we lived in was less important,
like a ramshackle stage with ratty curtains, behind which God or the devil would wave, but not step through,
since the Age of Miracles was gone. The only miracle these days was the leap of faith.
But I carried a box inside that other box. I knew miracles were real and I would consider the freckles on
a girl’s arm or watch the wind lift her hair to confirm that I had already leaped.
* * * *
One day near Easter I got on my bike and decided to go to Katie’s house. She lived on Ravenwood, the
other side of Bircher. This was an adventure. Even though I’d lived there all my life, I didn’t even know
anybody on my street except for our next door neighbors. At the top of the street, I coasted down to Bircher.
Then I turned right. The next block would be Ravenwood.
The image in my mind of me with Katie began to falter. What if her parents were cold? What if her
brothers were threatening? What would I say when I got there, anyway?
I turned around and went back to my street. There was a corner market my mother spurned after the
owner implied she hadn’t paid for something. Now on my own, I defiantly went in and bought a pack of
baseball cards. I went outside by a little stream behind the store. I opened the pack and smelled the flat wafer of
pink bubblegum. I looked at the players’ pictures and read their stats on the back.
our streets slammed into each other at odd angles

old two-story streetcar station now a corner ma & pa
had circus peanuts & bulk twizzlers behind glass
Walking home, I often came across unfriendly strays
in the dirt I shot catseyes clearies peewees swirls
with Mark and Terry and Wayne, flipped
baseball cards on blacktop, my Hobie Landrith
could take your Mickey Mantle if it landed right.
shadows of buds on sycamore bark

cardinal announce sky is open again!
it’s the time for loose gravel underfoot, kick soft dirt
smell of lefty first baseman’s mitt new-seamed
sunlight refracted by moving water

a loose lens screw tightened it to clear
fierce inexplicable joy came
with redwing blackbird cattail call
I got back on my bike and continued my ride to Ravenwood. When I got near Katie’s house, she was out
on her bike. We rode to an old quarry and threw rocks all afternoon.
It was like this big framed picture of myself that I’d been trying to hold upright in my shaky hands while
steering my bike just slipped away. I had a friend, not a frame.
My parents grounded me when I got home. I’d been gone too long, I’d ridden too far.
* * * *
My uncle came to stay with us for a while when I was twelve. I didn’t know him too well except he lived
in Florida and had a family there. There were some problems with keeping a job. It was all kind of vague, my
mom spoke about his past in dark tones that discouraged questions. He was different from anyone else in my
family. I knew what melancholy was-- I recognized it in him-- but there was a trait I didn’t know the name for
then: a sense of irony. Stories of misfortune came with a rueful laugh from the gut. After a few months it was
time for him to leave, and we took him to the bus station. Before he boarded, he handed me a book,
—Here, he said, read this some time if you’re feeling alone. It was a small book that fit in my jacket
pocket easily.
At home, I took it out and looked at it in my room. An old brown leather cover had the title embossed
with Arabic-style lettering in muted purple and gold. There were quatrains and brilliantly colored night
landscapes on facing pages.
Awake! For morning

In the bowl of night...
Dreaming when Dawn’s

Left hand was in the Sky...
Ah Love! Could Thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire...
I read the whole book on my bed and cried. So it was true.
* * * *
One Sunday night when I was thirteen, a visitor from Colombia came to church to preach a sermon,
delivered in a continuous blistering wail, entirely about Hell, and the tortures that awaited us there if we didn’t
accept Christ as our Lord and Savior right now,
It wasn’t just the graphic description of the everlasting slow plucking of fingernails, the gradual flaying,
the repetitive disembowelment, the cortege of excruciating pain, so that it was clear in the reality he wanted us
to see that was just around the corner, having a body was to be in pain.
Nor was it the infinite shame just short of blinding us to our transgressions, so we could see, in every
boiling laceration, in every severance of bone from muscle, of bone from bone, how clearly we were responsible
for this almost unimaginable suffering.
No, the most remarkable thing about this unending monologue of torture porn was that it was
inarguably true.
I went home as if awakened with a blunt instrument. This was the fate that awaited us. We had been
pretending, with our lust and gluttony and intellectual aspirations, our high hats and our favorite tv shows.
With central heating, you could even watch shows you didn’t like. This was all a pleasant dream which a
thinking person knew would someday end. How clearly he had brought it home. The clock was ticking. The
body was not just a liability. It was the enemy. It was every man for himself. O fool to think there was enough
time!
I was ready to go up and be baptized Wednesday night— I didn’t want to wait till Sunday, you never
knew— but on Tuesday afternoon my junior high school class went on a field trip downtown to see a matinee
performance of Inherit the Wind. We hadn’t read it, but I knew it was about a real event.
But as the drama of the small town invaded by the world stage unfolded, I recognized its inner contours.
I knew these townspeople, this jury that would decide the guilt of a teacher for telling his class about evolution.
I had been through half a dozen preachers. This was a constellation I could identify. But Darrow and Mencken
were new stars.
I went home confused I didn’t know what I thought. I felt a shifting.

That night I had a clarifying dream. Wind was turning pages of a book. I was sitting in a jury box.
Clarence Darrow was haranguing us and pacing the floor. We were the ones on trial. He was dressed like an old
Testament prophet, Isaiah in robes and a long beard, pounding a staff on the courtroom floor.
—Oh, I can throw your words back at you, he declared, his fierce eyes boring into ours.
I can mimic your scornful rant, your chapter & verse shouting fist pounding rostrum-shaking blaming and
shaming! As he spoke, he shouted or sang, mimicking our palsied gestures.
—Your hand on the shoulder of the tearful penitent, you pretend to look into her soul, exploiter of
human suffering! Your holy book answers make the devil laugh knowing the right questions will not get asked.
Ha!
But where do you make the difference, where is it your shameless barbs hit home? Where does this love-
starved wincing sect that says it is not a sect, this papier-mâché cringe and obey representation of the Way
Things Are, this abominable denomination that says it is the one, the true church, “the rock on which I shall
build,” get its power?
There was a hush, as if the world had been inhaled, and the answer came slowly, in a deep rumble,
building in volume as it oscillated dangerously in pitch.
—The way it justifies holding back. No hand-clapping, no speaking in tongues! Hushed hymns, no
gospel shouts! No expression of feeling in thought that is not from the Bible! Primary emotions passing as
feeling, choked and frozen by the gorilla in the room: God between every two souls!
We know each other only as our heavenly father’s broken reflections! So we know ourselves only as
broken reflections! You’re nothing as a man, you’re less as a woman! Human passion is all dicks and cunts, like
trashy nature, it is fallen and false! Nature matters only when it reminds us of our heavenly provenance! But woe
to the tree before the chainsaw, for it shall come down! Woe to the woman who looks fuckable, for she shall be
damned!
The judged banged his gavel and said —Order in the court! and I woke up.
* * * *
I never got baptized. I got my driver’s license and took out girls in my parents’ new Galaxy 500. This
was before bucket seats. We’d go to St. Ann Four Screen drive-in on St. Charles Rock Road and sit close. If we
didn’t like the movie we chose, we would check out what was showing on the other screens, or just get out and
walk under the stars.

Zary Fekete
Children's Clinic
As I walk out the front door of my apartment building I wave to my downstairs neighbor. He’s trying to
fix the fence out front. He’s retired, probably in his 80s. He has a wooden leg. I asked him about it when I first
moved in to the building. He said he lost it when he was 12. He and some friends were trying to hop onto a
tram downtown, hoping to ride for free. He said that he slipped and that was all it took. There was no
ambulance available in those days. A firetruck took him to the hospital. That happened in between the wars.
I live in Budapest. I’ve been here for four years.
There’s this cheese tasting thing happening today in my book club. Our group thinks that because it’s a
nice day maybe they’ll have it in the garden. Last month we finished up Heart of Darkness. Nobody liked it
very much. I guess this week we’re supposed to pick a new one. So we’re going to eat cheese and pick something
else to dislike.
I’m walking there now. Our group is held in the Jacksons’ flat. They live four blocks from me. I’m an
English teacher living in Budapest. I live in the 11th district which is considered the best district for
families…lots of wide boulevards and leafy parks.
Our group is mostly other expats who have gravitated to Budapest for one reason or another. There are a
couple of other teachers. One guy works for the government. There are two married couples…I think they work
for a church.
I actually really don’t care for our group. They remind me so much of myself that it makes me sick. We
all live here ostensibly to be altruistic. But when I talk with the others it kind of feels like we all took advantage
of an opportunity to live abroad while being paid American-level wages.
I’m very privileged to live here. I have more money than most of my neighbors. I don’t have to be
terribly selective in what I buy at the local grocery store. This makes me both happy and sort of miserable
because I feel like I haven’t earned the right.
I’m thinking about this as I walk. I turn a corner. I’m two blocks away from the Jacksons’ now. I think
about my neighbor back there fixing the fence. He is often doing odd jobs around the building. Last week I told
him that if I had time I might help him. I said that but I knew that I probably wouldn’t. I should feel guilty. Do
I? Maybe I’ll…
And suddenly, just like that, I notice the vacant lot.
I supposed I’ve passed it dozens of times. I pass it every time I visit the Jacksons. But today I really see it.
It is overgrown with brush and there are piles of scrap lumber piled here and there. The entire lot has a
rusty fence around it. It has an old, crumbling structure at the center…something official-looking. There are no
signs, but there is a cracked and fading cameo fresco on one of the outer walls showing two Soviet-era
schoolchildren walking…holding hands and carrying pails. I assume that it used to be a national children’s
clinic.
My downstairs neighbor had told me once that in the mid-twentieth century these kinds of clinics had
operated in every district of the city. The government wanted to make sure that everyone had care, and this
often applied as much to the parents as to their children. Nurses would call on you shortly after you returned
home from the hospital with your new child. “Everything ok?”
Next to the structure are two benches. They face a small grove of trees in one corner of the lot. The
benches must have been meant for patients in the clinic (the children) to take a seat in between treatments, to
have a small moment quiet in the fresh air. Looking at nature must be helpful for patients who are… well, they
don’t usually finish those sentences.
Suddenly and quite urgently I want to sit there. The lot is choked with weeds; there is rusty barbed wire
around the top of the fence, and the benches themselves are broken and splintered. I…yes.
Before I can talk myself out of it I am reaching up and lifting myself over the fence. The wire tears a
small rip in my shirt. As I lower myself into the lot I feel as though the sounds of the city fade just. I’m sure it is
my imagination. Gingerly I pick my way through a few patches of nettles. I approach the benches, and I sit.
For the first few moments I feel nervous. Somebody might notice me in here. Is this trespassing?
Then I feel the gravity slowly pull against my legs. I feel the rough wood at my back. I start to notice a
few more things. There are several small flowers dotted among the weeds. I see a bee. There are mosquitos, but
they are leaving me alone. I can hear their soft wings. Sort of like they are asking little questions as they search.
I look back at the street. It’s a bit darker now. How long have I been sitting here?
I stand. I decide to go back home. My group can wait. I’m going to help my neighbor with the fence.
Acta Biographia
Andrew Cyril Macdonald
Andrew Cyril Macdonald considers the role of inter-subjectivity in poetic encounter. He celebrates the
confrontations between self and Other and the challenges that occur in moments of injustice. He is founding
editor of Version (9) Magazine, a poetry journal that implicates all things theoretic. You can find his words in
such places as A Long Story Short, Blaze VOX, Cavity Magazine, Fevers of the Mind, Green Ink Poetry,
Lothlorien, Nauseated Drive, ODD Magazine, Synchronized Chaos, Unlikely Stories and more. When not
writing he is busy caring for seven rescued cats and teaching a next generation of poets.
Anna Kapungu
Bart Sonck
Born in July ‘77 in a whispery town

Living in a row-house with only one front door,
with in the back a flowerily garden with in the middle an old elm,
and a golden-yellow car as my best neighbor…
Bharti Bansal
Bharti is a 24 year old student from India. Her works have been published in magazines like aaduna,
oc87recoverydiaries.org, the sunflowers collective, two drops of ink, and is forthcoming in the anthology ,”the
yearbook of Indian poetry". She lives in a small village surrounded by mountains and find solace in poetry and
stars.
Brenda Mox
Brenda is a poet, visual artist, MFA retired art teacher, great grandmother and widow living on the shore at the
mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA. She has been writing poetry since her early 30s
and is published in Eber and Wein Publishing, Wingless Dreamer and BlazeVox Journal.
Brian Terrell
Brian Terrell currently lives in his native Mississippi. He works full time for a state government agency and
writes whenever he has the chance. He mainly writes poetry but has also completed a novel. In his free time, he
enjoys traveling and enjoying the beautiful outdoors.
Bruno Neiva
Bruno Neiva is a Portuguese text artist, poet, translator, and teacher. He has recently published Selected Text
Art 2010-2020 through Hesterglock Press.
Website: https://brunoneiva.weebly.com/
Candice Kelsey
CANDICE KELSEY is an educator and poet living in Georgia. She serves as a creative writing mentor with
PEN America's Prison & Justice Writing Program; her work appears in Grub Street, Poet Lore, Lumiere
Review, and Poetry South among other journals. She is the author of Still I am Pushing (2020) and won the
Two Sisters Micro Fiction Contest (2021). Recently, she was chosen as a finalist in Cutthroat's Joy Harjo
Poetry Prize. Find her @candicekelsey1 and www.candicemkelseypoet.com.
Charles Borkhuis
Charles Borkhuis is a poet and playwright currently living in San Diego. His 11 books of poetry include
Spontaneous Combustion, Dead Ringer and Finely Tuned Static. He is the winner of the 2021 James Tate
International Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the W.C. Williams Book Award. His poems will be
included in the 2022 anthology Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry (Lamar University Literary
Press).
Clive Gresswell
Clive Gresswell is a 64-year-old innovative writer and poet from the UK with an MA and BA in Creative
Writing. He reads regularly with the London-based Writers Forum. Clive has five poetry books the latest of
which 'Shadow Reel', a 16,000 word prose poem, can be obtained online at New Note Poetry Chapbooks.
Daisy Bassen
Daisy Bassen is a poet and community child psychiatrist who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative
Writing Program and completed her medical training at the University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has
appeared in Oberon, McSweeney’s and [PANK] among other journals. Born and raised in New York, she lives
in Rhode Island with her family.
David Felix
David Felix is an English visual poet.

For more than half a century his writing has taken on a variety of forms: in collage, three dimensions,
in galleries, anthologies, festival performances, in video and in over sixty publications worldwide, both in print
and online.
Born into a family of artists, magicians and tailors he is no stranger to the world of stretched canvas, smoke and
mirrors and shoulder padding.
Ethan Goffman
Ethan Goffman is the author of Dreamscapes (UnCollected Press, 2021)--a collection of flash fiction--and the
poetry collections I Garden Weeds (Cyberwit, 2021) and Words for Things Left Unsaid (Kelsay Books, 2020).
Ethan is co-founder of It Takes a Community, which brings poetry to Montgomery College students and
nearby residents
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander’s short story collection, On Anzio Beach, was published in 2017 by Ravenna Press. In
addition to BlazeVOX (Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Spring, 2018, and Fall, 2021) her work has appeared
in Gargoyle, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and many
other places. She lives in Santa Fe.
Eugene Stevenson
Eugene Stevenson, the son of immigrants, the father of expatriates, lives in the mountains of western North
Carolina. Author of The Population of Dreams (Finishing Line Press 2022), he is a Pushcart Prize nominee
whose poems have appeared in After Hours Journal, Angel City Review, The Hudson Review, Loch Raven
Review, San Pedro River Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Vassar Review, & Volney Road Review among others.
More at eugenestevenson.com
Gale Acuff
Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in over a dozen countries and has authored three books of
poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.
Glenn Ingersoll
Glenn Ingersoll works for the public library in Berkeley, California. The multi-volume prose poem, Thousand
(Mel C Thompson Publishing) is available from bookshop.org, and as an e-book from Smashwords. He keeps
two blogs, LoveSettlement and Dare I Read. Other writings have recently appeared in Unlikely Stories,
Mercurius, and The Sparrow's Trombone. Poems have appeared also in past issues of BlazeVox.
http://lovesettlement.blogspot.com
http://dareiread.blogspot.com
hiromi suzuki
hiromi suzuki is a poet, fiction writer and artist living in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Ms. cried – 77
poems by hiromi suzuki (Kisaragi Publishing, 2013), logbook (Hesterglock Press, 2018), INVISIBLE
SCENERY (Low Frequency Press, 2018), Andante (AngelHousePress, 2019), Found Words from Olivetti
(Simulacrum Press, 2020), Ephemera (Colossive Press, 2021). Double solo exhibition with Francesco Thérès
visual HAIKU | OLIVETTI poems was held in Rome, 9 ～30 September 2021.
Web site: https://hiromisuzukimicrojournal.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @HRMsuzuki
Ian Haight
Ian Haight’s collection of poetry, Celadon, won Unicorn Press’ First Book
Prize. He is the editor of Zen Questions and Answers from Korea, and with
T’ae-yong Hŏ, he is the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems
of Kyun Hŏ and Magnolia and Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim—finalist
for ALTA’s Stryk Prize—all from White Pine Press. Other awards include
Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Translation, and grants from the Daesan
Foundation, the Korea Literary Translation Institute, and the Baroboin
Buddhist Foundation. Poems, essays, interviews, reviews, microfiction and
translations appear in Barrow Street, Writer’s Chronicle, Hyundai
Buddhist News, Full Stop, MoonPark Review and Prairie Schooner. For
more information please visit ianhaight.com.
J. D. Nelson
J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His poetry has appeared in many
small press publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including
Cinderella City (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). His poem, “to mask a little bird” was nominated for Best of the
Net in 2021. Visit http://MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. Nelson lives in
Colorado.
J.L. Moultrie
J.L. Moultrie is a native Detroiter, poet and fiction writer who communicates his art through the written word.
He fell in love with literature after encountering Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Baldwin, Hart Crane, David
Foster Wallace and many others. He considers his work to be experiential, abstract expressions.
Jack e Lorts
Jack e Lorts, retired educator, lives in a small town in rural eastern Oregon. He has published widely, if
infrequently, since the late 1950’s, such places as Arizona Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly, English Journal, more
recently in Chiron Review, High Desert Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Phantom Drift, Windfall, and online
such places as Haggard and Halloo, Locust, Misfit, The Poetry Village, Verse Virtual & verse daily. Author of
three chapbook, The Daughter Poems & Others and The Meeting-Place of Words (Pudding House 2008 &
2010) and Dear Gilbert Sorrentino & Other Poems (Finishing Line 2011). His “The Love Songs of Ephram
Pratt” appeared in 2019 from Uttered Chaos Press. Active in progressive politics, he ran for the Oregon House,
was a Hillary delegate to the DNC in Denver in 2008, served on the City Council and as Mayor of Fossil,
Oregon for many years.
First published in the late 1950’s in such magazines as Ron Padgett’s White Dove Review, George
Bowering Open Letter & the pivotal LA journal Nomad, alongside the early work of Allen Ginsberg, Denise
Levertov, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Russell Edson, Marvin Bell, Larry Eigner & Cid Corman, among others;
he sometimes wonders what the hell happened?
Jack Skelley
Jack Skelley’s poems here will also appear in Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing published this year by
BlazeVOX. Jack’s other books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred &
Barney Press), and Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e) -- April, 2023). Jack’s work is widely anthologized. Collections
include: Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets(ed. Nicholas Christopher, Anchor Books), and Sweet Nothings:
An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry (ed. Jim Elledge, Indiana University Press. He was editor and
publisher of Barney: The Modern Stone-Age Magazine, featuring major artists and writers. He is songwriter and
guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale (SST Records).
Jacob McShane
Jacob McShane is a writer and amateur cyclist based in San Diego, California. Born and raised in the Wasatch
Mountains of Salt Lake City where his enthusiasm for skis, bikes and books was stoked at an early age, Jacob
combines these passions to create historical fiction. He is a graduate of the University of Utah, a masters student
at San Diego State, and an aspiring novelist.
Jeffrey Letterly
Jeffrey Letterly is a composer and multi-disciplined performer. He was born and raised in the heartland of the
Midwest and now resides in Syracuse, NY. His poetry appears in Atticus Review, Bird Brained Zine
Anthology, BOMBFIRE, The Comstock Review, Pif Magazine, Sip Cup, Stone Canoe, and other places.
Joan E. Bauer
Joan E. Bauer is the author of two poetry collections, The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag,
2008) and The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021). For some years she worked as a teacher and counselor
and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-hosts and curates the
Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins. Her new book of poetry, Fig Season, is
forthcoming from Turning Point in 2023.
John Tavares
Born and raised in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, John Tavares is the son of Portuguese immigrants from Sao
Miguel, Azores. Having graduated from arts and science at Humber College and journalism at Centennial
College, he more recently earned a Specialized Honors BA in English Literature from York University. His
short fiction has been featured in community newspapers and radio and published in a variety of print and
online journals and magazines, in the US, Canada, and internationally. His many passions include journalism,
literature, photography, writing, and coffee, and he enjoys hiking and cycling.
Jon Riccio
Jon Riccio is the author of two chapbooks, Prodigal Cocktail Umbrella (Trainwreck Press) and Eye,
Romanov (SurVision Books). His full-length collection Agoreography is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press.
Joe Gianotti
Joe Gianotti has taught English at Lowell High School in Northwest Indiana for twenty-five years. He is from
Whiting, a blue collar city just outside Chicago. He studied English, history, and education at the University of
Indianapolis and Purdue University. In 2015, he was among the poets who represented Northwest Indiana in
the Five Corners Poetry Readings hosted by then Indiana poet laureate, George Kalamaras. His poetry has been
published or is forthcoming in This, Literary Magazine, The Chaffey Review, Steam Ticket, The Tipton
Poetry Journal, and other places, as well as collected in the second volume of This is Poetry: The Midwest
Poets.
Joshua Martin
Joshua Martin is a Philadelphia based writer and filmmaker, who currently works in a library. He is the author
of the books automatic message (Free Lines Press), combustible panoramic twists (Trainwreck
Press), Pointillistic Venetian Blinds (Alien Buddha Press) and Vagabond fragments of a hole (Schism
Neuronics). He has had numerous pieces published in various journals including Otoliths, M58, The Sparrow’s
Trombone, Coven, Scud, Ygdrasil, RASPUTIN, Ink Pantry, and Synchronized Chaos. You can find links to
his published work at joshuamartinwriting.blogspot.com
Julia Nunnally Duncan
Julia Nunnally Duncan is a Western North Carolina poet and essayist. Her work has recently appeared
in Smoky Mountain Living, World War One Illustrated, Still:The Journal, Chapter 16, and others. New work
is forthcoming in Self-Reliance, Good Old Days, Critter Absurd, History Magazine, and others. Her most
recent books include A Neighborhood Changes (Finishing Line Press) and A Place That Was
Home (eLectio Publishing). She lives in Marion, NC, with her husband Steve and enjoys spending time with
him and their daughter Annie.
L. Sydney Abel
L. Sydney Abel is an author of psychological fiction and poetry. He was born and raised in Kingston upon Hull,
England. His novel 12:07 The Sleeping is based on personal experience of sleep paralysis and his forthcoming
book The Soul Spook continues this theme. He has also written and illustrated several children’s books and a
Y/A novel Timothy Other: The boy who climbed Marzipan Mountain, the first in a series of three.
Poetry is his personal escape in his book of emotive words Tongue is a Fire and the upcoming This Stardust
Heart.
Social Media:
https://theslider58.wixsite.com/lsydneyabel
https://www.lsydneyabelbooks.com/
Lohren Green
Lohren Green is the author of a book of poetry and prose entitled Poetical Dictionary, published by Atelos
Press, and a book of prose poetry entitled Atmospherics, published by Quale Press. He is also the creator of the
digital poetry project Ambient Poem. His writing has appeared in Open City, 32 Poems, Shark, and the
anthologies Old Flame and The Encyclopedia Project.
Lynn Ciesielski
Lynn Ciesielski taught Special Education for twenty-three years and retired from Buffalo Public Schools. After
she left her career she delved into poetry and currently has two chapbooks and over one hundred journal
publications. She has appeared in Iodine, Nerve Cowboy, Buffalo News and Slipstream among others. She has
an adult daughter and three young grandchild and Zoar Valley is one of her favorite places.
Marc Lerner
Marc Lerner is a writer living in Sydney, Australia. He has previously had work published in Azure: A Journal
of Literary Thought and Typishly.
Mark DeCarteret
Poems from Mark DeCarteret’s manuscript The Year We Went Without have been taken by The American
Poetry Review, Hole in the Head Review, Meat for Tea, Nixes Mate Review, Plume Literary
Journal and Unbroken.
Mark DuCharme
Mark DuCharme is the author of We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, The Unfinished: Books
I-VI, Answer, The Sensory Cabinet and other works. His book-length work Here, Which Is Also a Place will
be published this summer by Unlikely Books. In addition, two chapbooks are forthcoming: Scorpion
Letters from Ethel, and Thousands Blink Outside from Trainwreck Press. His poetry has appeared widely in
such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity,
Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for
Word, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. A recipient
of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he
lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Mark Fleckenstein
I was born in Chicago, and grew up in Ohio, Michigan, Connecticut, North Carolina and New Hampshire. I
graduated from University of North Carolina in Charlotte with a B.A. in English and after completing my
MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, moved to Massachusetts, and became very involved in the
Boston area poetry community. I was an assistant editor for (BLuR), the Boston Literary Review,
founder/coordinator of two bi-weekly poetry reading series in Boston, a workshop leader and twice nominated
for a Pushcart Prize. I’ve given poetry readings with famous poets (Charles Simic, Linda Gregg, Mark Doty,
Mark Cox and Carl Phillips) and not so famous poets.
Mark Harbinger
Mark Harbinger, a semi-retired Attorney, former IT Educator, and nonprofit manager, lives in the Pacific
Northwest, USA. For nearly twenty years, many of his short works—both speculative and literary fiction—have
been published online and in print. His occult fantasy novel, The Be(k)nighted: The Untold Origin of The
Precept, is available wherever books are sold. Mark enjoys being a father, a husband, and proud servant to
Murray A. Goodness (the Cat).
Mark Young
Mark Young's first published poetry appeared over sixty-two years ago. Much more recent work has appeared,
or is to appear, in The Sparrow's Trombone, Scud, Ygdrasil, Mobius, SurVision, NAUSEATED DRIVE, &
Word For/Word.
Michael Reich
Michael O. Starr
Mike Starr is a former biologist who has been writing poetry recreationally since 2004. Published for individual
poems in various venues, he is the author of The Passage is Still and Red Bears, Blue Squirrels. He is editor of
the independent literary e-journal [Alternate Route].
Nathan Anderson
Nathan Anderson is a poet from Mongarlowe, Australia. He is the author of The Mountain + The Cave and
Deconstruction of a Symptom and has work in BlazeVox, Otoliths, Beir Bua and elsewhere. You can find him
at nathanandersonwriting.home.blog or on Twitter @NJApoetry.
Nelson Gary
Nelson Gary’s works include XXX (Dance of the Iguana Press), Cinema (Sacred Beverage Press), A Wonderful
Life in Our Lives: Sketches of a Honeymoon in Mexico (Low Profile Press), and Twin Volumes (Ethelrod
Press). Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing (Mystic Boxing Commission) will be published
later this year. He currently earns his living as a criminal justice contractor (forensic psychology counseling
associate).
Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Nicholas Alexander Hayes is the author of Bliss (Alien Buddha Press, 2022), Ante-Animots: Idioms and
Tales (BlazeVOX, 2019) and Amorphous Organics (SurVision, 2019). His work has been featured in the
anthologies Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman and Madder Love: Queer Men and
the Precincts of Surrealism. Twitter: @Broken_Zipper Insta: @nicholasalexanderhayes
Ophir J. Bitton
Ophir Jacob Bitton is an Israeli-American attorney and writer. He writes about his daily observations, culture,
family life, nature and social justice issues he experiences in his law practice. He has published a collection of
poetry written about his courtship of his wife (Becoming Eyes, Aventine Press 2008), and his poetry has also
been published in Poetica Magazine, Jewish Literary Journal, Jewthink, and The Deronda Review. He resides
in Los Angeles, California.
Pamela Miller
Pamela Miller is the author of five collections of poetry, including Recipe for
Disaster and Miss Unthinkable (both from Mayapple Press) and How to Do the Greased Wombat
Slide (forthcoming from Unsolicited Press). Her text poetry and vispo have appeared in Otoliths, Word
For/Word, Book of Matches, RHINO, New Poetry From the Midwest, Nixes Mate Review and elsewhere.
She lives in Chicago and has just completed a visual poetry chapbook, Mr. Mischief.
Partha Sarkar
Partha Sarkar, a resident of Ichapur, a small town of a province West Bengal

Of India, a graduate writes poems being inspired by his the late Sankar Sarkar
And his friends (especially Deb kumar Khan) to protest against the social injustice and crime
against nature. His poems have been in different magazines
Both in Bangla and in English. At once, he would believe in revolution but now
He is confused because of obscurity of human beings though he keeps fire in soul despite.
Paul Tanner
Tanner has been earning minimum wage, and writing about it, for too long. He's allergic to cheese for crying
out loud, and his cat knows your sins.
Pete Prokesch
Pete Prokesch (he/him) is a writer and lives in Watertown, Massachusetts. His fiction can be found in Four
Way Review and Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and he is a reader for Epiphany. He also works in construction
and writes green-building education-curriculum.
Peter Mladinic
Peter Mladinic’s fourth book of poems, Knives on a Table is available from Better Than Starbucks
Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.
Ric Carfagna
Roger Craik
Roger Craik, Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University, Ohio, has written four collections of
poetry: I Simply Stared (2002), Rhinoceros in Clumber Park (2003), The Darkening Green (2004), and Down
Stranger Roads (2014), along with two chapbooks, Those Years (2007), (translated into Bulgarian in 2009), and
Of England Still (2009). His poetry has appeared in several national poetry journals, such as The Formalist,
Fulcrum, The Literary Review, The Atlanta Review, The London Grip and The London Magazine.
English by birth and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton, he has worked as a journalist,
TV critic and chess columnist. Before coming to the USA in 1991, he worked in Turkish universities and was
awarded a Beineke Fellowship to Yale in 1990. He is widely traveled, having visited North Yemen, Egypt,
South Africa, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, Bulgaria (where he taught during spring 2007 on a Fulbright Scholarship),
the United Arab Emirates, Austria, Croatia and Romania, (where from 2013-14 he was a Fulbright Scholar at
the University of Oradea).
He is glad every day that he is living in the USA. He watches the birds throughout the year, with joy.
Roger Singer
Ryki Zuckerman
ryki zuckerman is the author of the full-length collection, Looking for Bora Bora (Saddle Road Press, 2013),
and also seven chapbooks, including the gone artists (Nixes Mate, 2019), the skirt at the center of the
universe (The Writers Den, 2018), and Three Poems (University of Buffalo Poetry Collection). Her poems
have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Lips, Ghost City Review, anti-heroin chic, Dispatches
from the Poetry Wars, and elsewhere. Her work is anthologized, more recently in Insurrection from Gnashing
Teeth, in Moving Images from Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, and in A Celebration of Western New
York Poets from Buffalo Legacy Press. She is a co-editor of Earth's Daughters magazine and curates the
Literary Café at CFI reading series. Her poem, nomenclature, was one of those selected for the Just Buffalo
Literary Center/NFTA On the Move public poetry project and is displayed at the bus shelter at Elmwood and
Kenmore.
Shelley Stoehr
I teach composition and creative writing at Southern CT State University and write fiction, creative nonfiction,
and poetry. I have published poetry in literary journals and anthologies such as The North American
Review, The Gordian Review, and The Best Sixty-Four Poets of 2019. I received an honorable mention for the
2019 James Hearst Poetry Prize. My chapbook, Glitterotica, is forthcoming in Summer of 2022 from Dancing
Girl Press.
Sultana Raza
Of Indian origin, Sultana Raza’s poems have appeared in 100+ journals/anthologies, including Columbia
Journal, The New Verse News, Vita Brevis, Entropy, London Grip, Classical Poetry Society, Dissident
Voice, and Poetry24. Her fiction received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train Review, and has been
published in Knot Magazine, Coldnoon Journal, Setu, and Entropy. She has read her fiction/poems in India,
Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, England, World Con Dublin, the PCA/ACA conf. (USA), and at
CoNZealand.
Her creative non-fiction has appeared/will appear in numerous journals including Literary Yard, Literary Ladies
Guide, Litro, Vector (BSFA), Focus (BSFA), and File770. Her 100+ articles (on art, theatre, film, and
humanitarian issues) have appeared in English and French. An independent scholar, Sultana Raza has
presented many papers related to Romanticism (Keats) and Fantasy (Tolkien) in international conferences.
https://www.facebook.com/sultana.raza.7
William Pruitt
Hello. I am a poet, fiction writer and storyteller, and an Assistant Editor with Narrative Magazine. I have published
six books of poems including most recently, The Teacher Who Told Stories: poems and fiction from Cyberwit.net
and Hands No Hands from FootHills. I have told stories in numerous places in Rochester and upstate New York,
including the National Women’s Hall of Fame. I taught English for 26 years to non-native speakers. My wife Pam
and I have two children and two grandchildren. My work can be seen at wpruitt.com
Zary Fekete
Zary Fekete has worked as a teacher in Moldova, Romania, China, and Cambodia. They currently live and
work as a writer in Minnesota. They have previously been published in Goats Milk Mag, Shady Grove Literary,
Journal of Expressive Writing, Ginosko Literary Journal, SIC Journal, Warp10Fiction, Reflex Fiction, Potato
Soup Journal, Cholla Needles, and Rabid Oak. They enjoy reading, podcasts, and long, slow films.

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anonlinejournalofvoice

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

Printed in the United States of America

publisher of weird little books

Andrew Cyril Macdonald Anna Kapungu

Poetry Extra Extra

Micro-poem co-translations of the Korean Buddhist monk Ch’oŭi (1786-1866)

Acta Biographia — Author Biographies

Water flits before storm. Its crimson-set

of dark clouds permitting

In flaunt devotion their folds

upstage the moments erupting

when churlish conditions

surface safe haven affords.

This bends summer hymns protecting

a stringent sun’s despising

lost souls here presenting what

They ascend the drink’s chore.

A dry-spell hangs now

while the god’s throne embellishes

all over dead-calming.

It’s a quiet break notions delve

to rummage pain kept rational

time warps in so that shadow dwindles.

nine truths assembled

if havoc strikes and demeans them

under beams pricked of twenty bodies

Now sunk-in through the fowled preacher

Nomenclature and melodrama set their stage

It mothers in the graves the lines

as flow and clinch combine to press

Retracing steps, there

of each crevice we comb dark

uncollected in those rough distances

Wrong to not feel anguish, what comes next

strong in the pull lies thrill with

There tears along each

We dived deep into the ocean

I become a decorative fabric woven into society

In the deserted days

I finally washed my hands off love

Gone are the days when we lived for free

Pyramid of just Being

As if we all are like thunder,

Like thunder we all walk around

It seems I have to wait,

Every time thunder hits the ground

not a clue what you do,

not a ring to throw,

not a coin to swallow,

not a bread to borrow,

I’d rather be with you than being you,

You know I usually fall slowly into sleep,

but now and then I look to your face,

She awakes suddenly with the question:

She sits right up with her back against the wall,

She falls asleep with both ears closed: