Mollyhouse: Issue Three r1e3

MOLLYHOUSE

Issue Three

Edited by Raymond Luczak

Squares & Rebels Minneapolis, MN

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COPYRIGHT

The artwork on the cover is by Aleatha Lindsay.

[Image description of the cover: Against a warm purple background, a person, swathed in fabrics that blend jolts of electric blue with other shades of blue as well as reds and pinks with an occasional dab of white, is in front of a goldenrod-colored circle, which could look like a sun or moon depending on one’s view. The person’s face is masked with more fabric so we cannot ascertain the person’s gender, age, and the like. Framing this image is the same color as the goldenrod-colored circle, and the title MOLLYHOUSE in the same warm purple as the painting’s background. Below the title is a pair of ornamental whiskers in warm purple, and the subtitle ISSUE 3 | EDITED BY RAYMOND LUCZAK in dark mauve.]

Individual contributors in this issue own the full copyright to their respective work. Please the editor directly via email if you’re unable to reach a certain writer via the links provided in their bios.

Mollyhouse comes out twice a year. Submission guidelines can be found at mollyhouse.org.

SMASHWORDS LICENSE STATEMENT

Thank you for ing this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the editor (with the individual contributors retaining copyright to their own work), and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-

commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your .

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CONTENTS

David Cummer Mark Bromberg Lilah Katcher Travis Chi Wing Lau Cali Linfor Randall Ivey Daniel Edward Moore Antonio Vallone Naomi Ortiz Karl Sherlock Don Yorty J. Ivanel Johnson Mary McGinnis Mark Ward Brad Buchanan Eric Thomas Norris Cath Nichols Steven Riel

Ken Anderson Francis Goodman Nicole Taylor Felice Picano Patricia Walsh Van Ethan Levy A’Ja Lyons Maurice Moore Kathi Wolfe Gregg Shapiro Stephen Lightbown Cait Gordon Jackie Chou Beau Denton Jamieson Wolf

Contributor Bios

***

DAVID CUMMER

TO ALL THE BEAUTIFUL CARELESS IRREVERENT BEAUTIES OF THIS WORLD

To cut a lemon into

sl ic es,

to put ice tea into glasses,

it took her by surprise.

***

MARK BROMBERG

BUDDHA SAYS

Open your palm I want to give you a stone.

The stone may be wisdom or it may not, it depends on what you do with it.

some stone waits to be sand waits to be mirror waits to be telescope glass waits to be mud

what is below the mud? dirt dust gravel but the stone waits to be stone again

try and spend a lifetime asking the right question instead of seeking the wrong answer

try to ask the stone why it wants to be stone and you will have your answer

***

LILAH KATCHER

STONES

When we were first learning each other, we discovered we each had a stone for rubbing away worries. That first weekend you visited, we compared stones. Dark gray, oval and smooth, they could have come from the same riverbed. We traded them, and held the unfamiliar stones, each feeling traces of the other’s touch. Later, we sat on my bed and talked for hours, and our stones remained together on the nightstand.

***

ACTAEON

Today, I offended the wrong goddess, and when she flung her cursed water my senses sharpened at the first drop:

I heard the water splash against my chest and trickle down, felt an alien pressure at my temples

and the wet rip as bone broke through, smelled the succulent leaves

and the blood running down my face, tasted its metal,

heard you, my loyal ones, snarl and bark, and felt

teeth pierce the muscle of my calf.

As I fell into your writhing mass, I saw for one second a familiar brown eye. I felt the brush of fur against my palm.

***

DOCUMENT

By the bathroom sink is a Petoskey stone. Formed from life in Devonian seas, when forests were young. This stone holds a secret document of life and time long past. The stone’s code can be broken by the element it came from. I hold the stone under running water so its surface comes alive: dark hexagons, coral skeletons.

***

TRAVIS CHI WING LAU

TO WHAT DO I OWE THIS PLEASURE

from the clumsy mingling of bodies neither of us truly owns—here are we defrocked to our shabby relations, more borrowed than we like to it because debt is shared tissue— proof of barest living in worlds teeming with ceaseless owing.

a pair of dirtied hands wrapped about another: this work of shared holding even as we worship the bleaching of porcelain made for sullying. but what could erupt from this dirty state that has accompanied us long enough to forget cleanness itself was traded for

in good faith in good exchange?

we lay ing filthily owing, owing, owing.

***

CALI LINFOR

MARRIAGE BED

I had to dismantle the bed the week after your funeral.

The mattress shaped by the years of our bodies side by side, the dip in the middle, collapsing springs, a stain from my period, another from a fever sweat, and that one maybe from sex or a spilled drink.

We had planned to replace it soon anyway.

You constantly stubbed your toe on the footboard. The wood of the headboard scratched and nicked by the cats or me or both. I am not careful. The bed was stupidly high. My feet dangled.

Our dog went suddenly lame, my love.

So, I needed to be on the ground like your futon after we broke the frame in your place on Locust St. The snapping of the pine louder than our laughter when you tossed me in the air and followed me down.

The dog needed to spend months in a crate recovering from spinal surgery. No one’s fault. A genetic abnormality. I needed to be close. He isn’t used to sleeping alone either.

I am now a disabled person with a disabled dog.

The emergency vet told me taking care of him would likely be too much for me. For anyone. Too costly. This dog who saved your life making you get up every day and walk just a little.

He runs so fast in his cart I can’t catch him.

Strangers ire his spirit. His pluck. Ask for pictures. Say every fucking thing they want. He doesn’t even care.

We should all be like him. Doesn’t want to just die. Keeps going. So cute! He is cute. Always has been.

You should see the dog chase a rabbit careening on one wheel.

At the hardware store, the clerk asked to see my hands. I thought I might somehow have paint on my palms so I raised them up for her to examine and inspect forgetting there is anything unusual about me.

How do I work all of me into an online dating profile?

My new bed is hilariously femme. Turquoise. Tufted. New mattress. Purple sheets. Low slung for the dog. Piled with my favorite soft blankets and bright comforters. The ones you gave me as anniversary gifts.

I am trying, my love, to integrate past and present.

We made our baby in that old cherry bed. You sat impatiently on the end while I peed on a stick with the bathroom door wide open. A habit

that irritated you every other time. We waited, flopped back, together, thigh to thigh, for that precious double line to appear.

I sold the frame to a mom and her teenage girl for a 150 dollars.

I think you would like this new bed. It’s pretty and sturdy just like me you’d say. Whimsical and hopeful. Cozy and warm. Everything good really. I read there. Write there. Watch movies and eat ice cream with our child who is becoming a man. Listen to music. I rest. I cry.

The dog will always be paralyzed and you will always be gone.

It took your son and I 10 hours to build the damn thing. I swore a lot like I do. Him too. He’s 14 now and allowed. You know how much I despise an Allen wrench. We impressed each other, raged at each other, were silly with each other. Worked well past midnight. The dog dancing at our feet. None of us ever giving up.

This bed is a good memory too.

***

RANDALL IVEY

EPILOGUE FOR ALL POEMS

I.

I see a mountain you cannot see. I want to go there and be lost.

I feel a cold rain you cannot feel. I want to bathe in it ‘til it grows warm.

I hear a song you cannot hear. I want to gorge on it and choke to life.

I smell a flower burning at graveside. I want to follow its roots to hell.

I taste the last of the winter sunshine. I want to find the part of darkness that freezes flesh.

II.

A three-headed dog guards the gates of hell. It needs all three to herd the census.

Who knows who might jump the fences And return to flesh with a tale to tell?

III.

A woman drowns her sons For want of riches.

A man shoots himself Because he misses his dead mother.

A man kills his wife in front of their child Because he believes she is cheating on him.

A boy belies his Winchester’s safety is on

And aims it at the face of another boy.

A couple stab to death a rival And dump her body in the river.

When we do murder in this small town, We do it big or don’t do it at all.

V.

When I dream, it is usually of the dead, Usually of my mother and father.

They are young again and free of illness.

***

EVERYTHING I HAVE IS FUCKED UP

Everything I have is fucked up – Eyes, ears, legs, dick –

Floaters crisscross my line of vision Like whipping, black dragons of malice, Making a page of prose or poetry Nearly indiscernible at times. I hate going into the bathroom With its white tile, knowing the demons Will be unleashed and dance like crazed children. Sometimes I want to reach up and pluck out The offending eye, both of them, and live the rest Of my life with tin cup and cane.

One morning I woke with left ear squealing And it’s not stopped since – not in over Five thousand days and counting. Any other part of my body would by now

Have worn out, given out of steam. Not this one. My only solace is in knowing Beethoven Suffered the same misery and Michelangelo, Rousseau, Van Gogh, Martin Luther, Goya, Schumann, and most of the cast of Star Trek.

Otherwise, it’s a useless bitch, Especially bad in summertime.

In ‘08, the spine bent with a hematoma; Out of nowhere it came, like the proverbial thief, Blazing pain through back and flanks, And took both legs with it, Along with the bowels, the bladder, and the phallus. Two months in a hospital bed, pissing into a tube, Shitting into a metal can, with erections an impossibility. Voices whispered in both ears, authoritative ones, Suggesting this would be as good as it would get: Lifetime in a chair and partial disability.

I said to hell with them and got back on my feet. I now live with the cane but not the cup.

Master Priapus, captain of my every action, Arbiter of my nearly every waking thought, Wondered what happened, why I had left him for dead, When nearly daily he had received my loyal obeisance Since discovering what fun he was some thirty years before. It was no use; other organs needed my attention. Sex was as remote as the star of Venus, maybe farther. It occurred to me at some point, though, I had been Punished for my years of cupidity, for shirking Greater responsibilities in deference to lust.

I was a man, am one; I couldn’t let go of my friend. I come quickly now, with less pleasure, but I come.

Everything I have is fucked up, And age only loosens the mortars further. (Hair is going, and teeth will follow.) But I love life still, hunger after it

With the appetite of the young The dreams of the innocent, The hope of the blighted. I’ll get up and wobble to the door And tear out into the sun which blinds me, While flesh fails and death says, “Here! Over here!”

***

DANIEL EDWARD MOORE

HEAVEN

Our investigation is ongoing as to why they chose to leave, abandoning the world like a baby in a dumpster, willing to shed their bodies like snakes, tired of the skin mother gave them. Heaven is not the boy next door taking your daughter to the prom. Heaven is why summer’s stare brings melons and melanoma. Heaven is why the sky took its life many clouds ago. Heaven is where the gone become gorgeous. Heaven is not just a place of interest. Heaven is a primary suspect.

***

HYPODERMIC HALLELUJAH

What if we started over, from placenta to place to purpose & back with only the breath you took from my mouth

on the day I made you my hot air balloon & love felt like an impending crash in a drunk cab ride across town kind of way?

What if the smoke’s hazardous conditions prevented the angels from seeing us there floating in the gutters of

a blasphemous storm, wearing out our welcome in this crime of a world with fingerprints smudged & precious?

Enough with time’s tourniquet of hope, with questions doing their squeeze & release.

Either be my needle, or don’t.

***

ANTONIO VALLONE

MAGIC

So I could one-up the sneaky bastard, I try to figure out the magician’s trick. I peek up his sleeve while the audience watches his assistant leaning over the two pieces of the coffin-shaped box we just watched the magician saw in half while she was lying down inside. Her cleavage captures the whole room’s undivided attention, except, this one time, mine. There’s nothing up the magician’s sleeve: not a rabbit or bouquet of roses, not a dove flapping its wings, not a single drop of his assistant’s blood. I’ll be damned if then his sleeve disappears and after it his sleight hand. Just as my mouth forms the O of how, the magician disappears —tux, top hat, and all. I’m left alone, out of the spotlight’s glare, dust motes floating around me like, well, like dust motes, nothing magic, nothing, nothing at all.

***

NAOMI ORTIZ

HAND TOWEL ACCESS I.E. THE LITTLE THINGS

The bathroom paper towel dispenser directions are clear – PULL BOTH HANDS

Meaning: Lift one arm up, twist wrist, palm up, grip paper towel on corner between 5 fingers and thumb Lift other arm up, turn wrist, palm up, clasp 5 fingers to thumb, grasping the other corner of paper towel Apply equal pressure, pulling downwards on each side – gently! Don’t let go! To dislodge your single serving, bend one elbow up and sideways ripping on perforated edge.

When I try, arm extended, elbow straight, turned as sideways as arm can go, one finger to thumb, pinching towel. I try yanking down from the middle, I get a tiny scrap of paper

Next time, I tug down hard on one side.

I get a dime size piece

With Crip tenacity, I consider the situation carefully. This time, I press towel, ever so softly, with one finger, as centered as I can get, against the side of the other arms curled wrist, a firm two-hand pinch. I exhale the breath I’ve been holding to coordinate such a position, focus, and pull down smoothly, but with force – only to get a perfectly round tidbit of brown paper towel

Day after day, public bathroom after bathroom, I’m reminded, individuality isn’t served here. The deserving, are those functionally just like the others. Cookie cutter people for this single serving world.

***

KARL SHERLOCK

HOW TO MOUNT A SICK-ROOM TV

Using your average stud finder, palm the flat hand of it against the drywall, until it pings with an infrared calm. Pencil the moment. Drill until splinter and plaster dust are couplet. This is where to fathom the topmost bolt, and how to sink true the steely other

into the shin bones of your house. This is how a wall-mounted flatscreen should swag: like an offertory hat, a wrist in a sling, or an awkward pause in a eulogy. Now, calibrate its declination and pivot. Power on its shrill obliquities of streaming apps:

open-concept living; dewy-eyed serial dramas; klaxoning ideologues; bickering upscale housewives. This is how to be, and how to be sustained, how to couch infirmity within that frailty of memory foam, clean cotton bedding, and a wireless

remote jigged beside your hip while power cords synapse the underbelly of your bed. This is what joists hope: a constant of mitered walls, a spouse handy at stoutly bolting to them whatever cantilevers deepmost and cumbrous from within you.

This is how he battens down alongside you and surveils your repose; how he waits for you to toggle on, scatter into those lambent capillaries of blue-white pulse.

This is how you will curve to his parenthesis of hands, tilt upward

to the axis of his mouth. This is why you will puzzle your invalid limbs into a hard-bitten bulwark of shank nail and sheetrock, become a thing at once upright and pendent as breath; why this bedridden life, pinned, knuckled, shall not, like a morticed hinge, shut you.

***

RHUBARB

Question, dear one: What is green? Ireland, for starters—recalled as a Midwest city boy would, in tracts of farmland: how olivine unspools from under the landing gear ineluctably, in fortyseven hues, a pesto of fields chopped by stonework, stray pixels of waggling cattle.

No. I always say what when I mean why. Best answer, then: in boots set down upon Cavan’s wet turf, not damp, but warm below the shins, where green is not itself, rather a tangerine sweet

of perennial ryegrass or stinging nettles. Green mildews and oozes, brickles pastures tilled by cutworms and old roots. Green is pink as a calf’s cloven step, unctuous lungfuls of raw butter. Green is …

What’s the why of green—its raison d’etre? Go: Okay. Green is rhubarb stalk you cut instead to knucklebone, your slashed forefinger merged into a white enamel basin of well water—how its purse of blood puckers and gasps; how, like a caught fish, it draws its ink from its bladder, to leave behind it the map of its dying.

Yeah, sure. Elizabeth Bishop called. She wants her similitude returned. You live now, a younger older man, the seasonal worry of charred mesas as incus clouds lumber over the eastern desert, the blue-masked pandemic unslaked, and the things that still make of you a greening: your parrot, her serpentine sentience you spoil like a nestling; your husband, blind now with cataracts of milk and seventeen shades of thistle gray. Your keloid scar, just a shut little mouth nicked upon your finger’s apical stem. Gray fallows …

Careful. You’re taking this way too far, kiddo.

Gray fallows with his infirmity, maples his urinals, beetroots his gauze, soils his neat pastures of sickbed sheets. Gray is a new potato red, turned and raked against what ground-ward pulls him.

I’m-a politely ask you to stop here. Watch as he sinks beneath sleep’s indigo frost, and what is gray becomes a force of green not quite itself, a green that lies in wait to cut itself from out our rhubarb bones, and hide inside the bowl of his breath, plosive and suckling of air.

This is pure maximalist assholery. it it, you were never as green as you prismed yourself

to be. Can’t recall that scar without its green concomitance of rhubarb patch and the clotted jade of your husband’s eyes, or cautionary red ochre stripe and circle of O2 cannulas that dare you to smudge these sixty-six smoky hues of sage against the slow, refractory dying of him. Have I not made myself adequately green?

Yes. Please, just—for god’s sake—keep on going.

***

DON YORTY

231

There is a lot of wind in the mountain. There happen to be some chimes as well. The wind has many throats; this little bell is made of metal; the chimes are wooden pieces sawed and painted wearing away telling the wind’s story in a hurry like snakes make a ruckus over the leaves down the rocks to the valley far away. “It is happening! It is happening!” the bell sings as the rain starts to pitter patter on the trees making me shiver holding my notebook close as I’m running page after page for a time hid away waiting like the chimes for something to say.

***

233

My mother pulled the black snake from the bush. Long snake gone from fleeing to being held twined around her arm and opened its mouth but mother only laughed and let it twist. Her friends who had come to party at her barbecue wanted whiskey sours, not this and yelled “Theresa!” parting like the waves did for Moses when his raised scepter hissed. My mother held on through the yard toward the house, the cellar steps, down to the dark cellar itself. “Go, find the mice. They’re yours,” she said letting it go to the shadows going back to her friends and the roasting corn. That was my mother from the day she was born.

***

J. IVANEL JOHNSON

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

The casket was oddly-shaped, with angles and curves of rough-hewn yellow pine. A number of faded and frayed ribbon skirts were draped over it, like flags at a fighter’s funeral. Carried by four siblings in celebration regalia, it still stood out brightly even when they’d moved into the shade. The chief must have said something witty to those gathered because after a long silence, there was a surging burst of laughter. Gilda Runningcalf sat high up on the ridge of the coulees, binoculars to her nutbrown eyes, scanning far below as her grandmother’s novel manuscripts were buried. She performed a mental memorial of farewell in her own mind: her beloved elder sitting at her electric Smith-Corona, banging away often into the night, creating stories that had been ed down through the tribe for generations. And then reading chapters from them aloud. Gilda lapped up those comforting images, those rhythmic sounds that came simultaneously, like cicadas singing in the sultry summers—even the scent of the old woman’s musky cardigans and the ever-smoky fire around which they would gather to listen. However, the publishers had always rejected Elva’s work, claiming there wasn’t enough sex in them to keep readers hooked. “Boudoir Scenes,” they’d called them way back then, though Gilda thought they’d have been more politically inaccurate to ask for “Teepee Titillations.” After a while Grandma Elva gave up writing with the goal of publishing and simply kept pounding out her fascinating epics for her relatives’ enjoyment. Two months ago, just days before Elva’s ing, she’d told her granddaughter: “ your promise. Keep writing and don’t give up until you’ve published. Keep our stories alive, my heart-child.” At the time, Gilda had thought to write with Elva’s name as her pen name—had thought she’d even use some of her grandmother’s life-long work, perhaps just restructure and

modernize some of the tales a bit. But Elva had left a will stating explicitly that all her 73 years of writings be either burned or buried. There was no way Gilda could stand by (a figure of speech as her shriveled legs would hardly take her weight) and allow all those words and stories to be burned up, black ashes of ancestry and articulations arcing into the sky on the tailcoat of some nonchalant chinook. The Snow-Eaters, as her people called them. Her idea was that if they were buried with witnesses in attendance—proof that as executrix she’d kept her word—perhaps someday a hole in the legality of the will might be whittled around, and she could then resurrect them. As it was, after Elva’s private cremation just a few days after her death as she’d requested, Gilda had quickly scanned the novels again and scribbled a journal full of notes about her grandmother’s main plots, storylines and characters. Thus, today was the ceremony for that burial. And as Elva hadn’t wanted any kind of funeral or memorial, Gilda and her siblings had thought it a lovely idea to bury this legacy of life’s work in Bison Canyon where Elva had written her first stories as a young girl in her loose-fringed dresses. But as the pallbearers had had to carry the “coffin” down a winding path to arrive at the bottom of the coulee, Gilda’s wheelchair was unable to access the special gravesite. She and her husband Arch thus waited on top until the Blackfoot chief, officiating in his heavy buffalo robe despite the springtime heat, and the four “pallbearers” who were her three brothers as sister Pauline climbed back to the top, leading the procession. Pauline carried the ribbon skirts that had been made and worn by Elva and their great-aunts and which had draped the pine box prior to it being lowered. That touch had been her sister’s own inspiration at the last minute and Gilda was grateful. “We should have brought you our big striped umbrella, Gil,” said Rufus as they and all the native-dressed followers arrived, huffing. “At least we had the tree down there to stand under. Otherwise, poor Chief Madplume might have ed out. It’s hotter than a sweat lodge, and it’s only May!” “Arch and I were fine here with our Stetsons and some sunscreen. Plus the beer. Have one.” Gilda reached into the cooler beside her and handed several out to the gathering group. “It’s you all that must be dying in this heat.” As Gilda handed brother Emers a cold can of Big Sky Stout, she asked, “What did the chief say at the beginning that was so funny?” Arch squatted down near

her chair to hear the answer. They had both been curious about that. If she’d known all those years ago that that barrel-racing accident would have led to her missing out on so much laughter in her life … —nope, she’d still have galloped Dusty into that arena. Emers smiled. “Oh, he said it was such an unusual type of ‘funeral.’ So like Elva to downplay herself and her accomplishments and yet to think outside the box. And then Rufus muttered, ‘And not to stink inside the box.’” Gilda smiled at that because in a way she felt they’d both won—she’d gotten rid of (but not destroyed) those manuscripts, and they’d managed a tribute service for her dear grandmother without technically contradicting any of her final wishes.

*

Twenty years later, a widowed Gilda was wheeled by her nephew, Emers’s son Joe, to the edge of the same cliff, this time to see her own unpublished works buried along with her grandmother’s. While she had exhumed a few novels of Elva’s and had tried reworking them, literary agents—unlike her ancestor’s mailout attempts, by that point one could not query publishers directly—had been sending back rejections that she found disturbing. Comments such as “while it would be interesting to represent a work written over 50 years by a grandmother and her offspring’s offspring, we find the plot too farfetched and unbelievable.” And another: “No reader, indigenous or otherwise will wish to be reminded of the abuse the residential schools allegedly condoned.” Yet, though they had been written as fiction, both her own and Elva’s books were heart-pourings of own-voice experiences, historically true and honest s amalgamated into one plot and a few related subplots. Others in the family called “Racist!” But Gilda knew the issue was generally just white people in the publishing industry over-thinking minutiae and not thinking enough about the impact these stories could have made. They needed to think outside the box, but she had yet to connect with a publisher or agent who was willing. And her time was running out. The stories pleaded for remembrance, so that history would not be repeated. Shouldn’t both white and native be constantly aware of the suffering and pain of

those who’d survived the missionaries’ schools? Or the heartache left by their community’s missing or murdered women? Or any of Elva’s other eye-opening topics—stories built around fetal alcohol syndrome, domestic abuse, the high rate of rez. suicides, reclaiming the natural environment and the day-to-day racism that had been experienced since the first “whitefoot” had stepped onto their land? The old clichés like “sweeping it under the rug” and “not living in the past” needed re-examining. But Gilda knew it wasn’t her fight any longer. Her Calgary specialist had recently informed her that her condition was now causing her entire body to deteriorate; she felt that she hadn’t any longer to leave the legacy she’d promised her grandmother. While debatably breaking that promise by having some manuscripts exhumed, she’d also taken a step closer to the pledge: three of her short stories had been published in anthologies in the last decade with the name “G. Elva Runningcalf” on the front or back covers. But these stories weren’t about their culture and traditions and only one was even a serious topic: essentially about her own disability and how she’d coped with that particular bias. It was late in the afternoon now. Gilda sat, wilted knees blanketed, with Joe standing quietly but ively beside her. They watched as the old casket was pull-eyed up once again by her family and friends, and the new one—a hollow aluminum canister that had been purchased specifically as a bespoke timecapsule—was filled with her decades-worth of sweat and tears. It was as if it were the chrysalis, the pupa. It was the hardened shell that would protect their delicate wings of vibrant color, their vivid tales of legacy and survival. She ed Arch once saying, before the bar brawl which had taken his life three years ago, that she worked too hard at her writing for no benefit. She’d answered, “There’s a soul benefit, dear.” But he’d initially misunderstood. “And just one benefit’s enough? For all this angst and rejection?” “No, Arch—not ‘S-O-L-E.’ The other kind.” To which he’d thought a moment, then nodded. “O.K. I get it. That’s a lot of benefits.” Arch had always been like that. She missed him. Joe placed a hand on her shoulder, feeling her emotion. “Auntie, you know what

I promised you. Okan is already getting a lot of attention at the smaller film festivals, and when it helps make a name for myself, all my future screenplays are coming out of the words and ideas in that big cookie jar.” He pointed to the capsule and smiled as a few pages of Elva’s old manuscripts fluttered out of the vessel, trying to escape. The butterflies had been more than ready to fly, but Pauline rushed to “save” them. And in saving, once again entrapping. How fitting. Much of Gilda’s early works were hard copy as well, but today they weren’t just burying paper piles. There was also an assortment of tapes, floppy discs, CDs, and memory sticks being transferred. All of Elva’s work, all of Gilda’s, would now be buried together. Such “arresting” stories, Gilda had retorted sarcastically, that they’d now just be “resting.” Pauline was doing most of the transferring while the men dug. One rectangular hole to exhume the box, one new circular hole for the ball-shaped canister. And with the tree’s roots having tentacled farther under the dry dust of decades, the process was taking longer than expected. “Joe, I’ve been thinking. Maybe our stories were never meant to be read.” “But …” “No, I mean if not read, then seen. If we couldn’t do it as female authors, then your great-grandmother and I both pray you can do it as a male filmmaker. And you know what? I believe you will. One of my stories is called ‘Horizon of Hope.’ That’s what you’ve given me, Nephew. Hope. And look!” She pointed with one trembling hand as she patted his fingers with the other. They watched in awe. An orange swathe streaked through fuchsia flecks almost parallel with where the two stood on the coulee’s ridge. Currents of bright blue rolled back on themselves through cotton-candy clouds and magically, a feather shape emerged, long and tufted. While all was bustling in the gathering gloom below, Joe and Gilda were calm and still in the radiance of this ancestral sign. Sign of the Sundance. “Okan,” Joe whispered. The “grave” was ready, aptly, at sundown. Those below gathered around the hard chrysalis before it was lowered. A smoky smudging by Emers, a final pat from Pauline and it began its descent. Once again, the stories of a dynasty were buried. Once again to be transformed by the next stage, the next age,

metamorphosing into some light and radiant wings that might finally fly. Outside the box.

***

MARY McGINNIS

FIESTA

For your writing, be in clouds or sun; I know there’s a slender, whining part from early in your life, it said you couldn’t. Now stand near the ladder of hypnogogic states, tilt your head, feel what your dark says. Allow a shadow to guide your hand.

For now, the drip of rain is far away; another part of here where ravens don’t live, tingles with the bark of a crow. Allow that one bird to sing and sing.

***

1951, ALMOST ANYWHERE

There are tiny, intense, daring, marooned women almost anywhere out past 1951.

They care to blossom, they learn to pinch, stretch, bite, tackle,

wave, and fly. They make mounds walk across tracks

and start to dream in color. They breathe deep, climb up steep hills,

careful not to fall. They make friends, believe in collecting pets,

then head for the stars. What we can’t hear in time, we forget.

***

MARK WARD

LISTENING TO LOLITA PODCAST

The year I lost my virginity was spent talking to an older man.

We never met outside of the chat room. I had picked the Virgin

Gay UK one, an ocean away from our semi. It became nightly,

these conversations, dial-up cable threaded down the stairs, silencing

the phone line. I never told him anything identifying. He encouraged

my artistic pursuits. I would bathe before bed and he would sign off,

telling me to enjoy our nightly bath. I don’t anything

else. I was reading Lolita and not getting it at seventeen.

He told me I shouldn’t read it, that it was inappropriate, something my mother had said too.

***

VILLAGE after Keith Vaughan

All because six families decided to veer off a main road and name that space they built their families in, brick by brick. I know each of them too well, so I squint. It makes life more interesting. They think I have problems that aren’t them, that I’m thick. I’d rather just see color than a face. A wash of blue easily elided.

Splinters of wood invade my sight, dotted around the village like scarecrows. I cannot read the names on each cross. I rush home to check everyone’s alright. My empty house refuses to disclose. My eyes won’t recognize what must be loss.

***

BRAD BUCHANAN

“BUT DID YOU DIE?”

I do not so much shine my shoes as try to imbue them with new life as if a little elbow grease could rejuvenate my walking pace or make an awkward gait more gainly

slow steps may pick up a gleam from the sun as I haltingly orbit my home late on this October morning at any rate the dust is gone with last April’s moldy pollen

such have been these encrypted times a vehicle decal asks a question I answer but cannot understand

I did not in die, however graveward my path might have seemed to tend however raw my disrepair

a monster truck did not ride roughshod over the sidewalk as I went blind and tripped over those many curbs on break-ankle thoroughfares lost my footing in a cloud

these same old beat-up black-soled derbies saw me through though I can it it now I despaired

***

CRAWLING LIKE A TIGER THROUGH

Crawling like a tiger through the jungles of my skin, this illness is a predator I gently entertain.

It nibbles at my riddled liver, slaps my silly tongue, sends a certain enzyme into places of self-harm.

By nights I ride its twisted logic though it brings me pain; by mornings mount a spiny seahorse bidding me not to drown.

***

ERIC THOMAS NORRIS

THAT TIME I MET EINSTEIN

It is a question of perspective. Crazy as it sounds, consider this Gedanken-Experiment: beyond one sleepy patent office in Berne, Switzerland, how many individual cuckoo clocks— whimsically whirling around the dark-hearted cyclone at the center our galaxy— completely agree? To my certain knowledge, nobody has undertaken a comprehensive survey of timepieces—or pieces of time, if you prefer—in the Cosmos, so nobody knows. Nor can we agree on what we don’t know. I expect it is a lot of things. More than we can imagine. One can only theorize. But, being such a one—such a Nobody for now—or such a cuckoo—it is impossible to say what I am some days—I thought would try. Therefore, I invite you to cast your mind back—if you have a mind—and even if you don’t, you might as well make the gamble anyway, like I did, since, like me, you were wise enough never to invest any self-esteem in being right or wrong about anything—back to the memorable December of 1899 Anno Domini. At the time, I was visiting the Continent (No man is an island, after all.) with my friend’s fiancée and mistook the local Patent Office for a Post Office, while searching the streets for a stamp. The young clerk in charge was a bored and lonely fellow with wild black hair. When tinkerbell rang, he was busy doing nothing, in an oak swivel chair, his boots precariously balanced on a clumsy Ziggurat of periodicals, books, and papers, beside a cluttered desk. Actually, no—he might have been snoring.

Well, his mouth was open, and a fluttering mustache was distinctly visible: the rest of his identity was concealed beneath a back number of—let us lean over the flimsy partition isolating Fact from Fancy—Annalen der Physik. I poked him in the shoulder with my sheathed swordstick. He slid the magazine down his face with his left hand and opened his right eye. When he saw it was me—a dangerous gentleman in need of assistance—he rocketed from his chair, nearly colliding with the ceiling. He knocked down the Temple of Science as he scrambled for consciousness. Naturally, he seemed somewhat distressed and disoriented by the appearance of a silk-hatted masked-man—wearing patent leather pumps, a Karakul coat with a genuine mink collar, and evening dress—in his poky pigeonhole, at Noon. He kept looking up at the cuckoo clock on the wall and back at me—searching the eyes behind the mask for meaning—while my simple sign language and, frankly, easy to satisfy demands for a stamp escalated. Seeking to mollify me in person, perhaps—hands raised, palms outwards—he glided through the wooden turnstile separating us. “Bitte, mein Herr, bitte …,” he begged. I brushed his chalky hands away from my lapels—growling—in English—that my bitterness was none of his damned business. And that all I wanted to do was send the postcard I was waving—the gaily tinted blur of a nearby landmark—the marvelous medieval Zytglogge astronomical clock—to a sick friend in the Congo.

[“Having a GREAT time with your fiancée, Kurtz! Glad you aren’t here!”]

“Gott in Himmel!” he ejaculated, grabbing the unstamped postcard, and adding a blow with the heel of his hand to his forehead, “Dummkopf!” suddenly

comprehending everything. Holding up an index finger, licking it, testing the air, taking a blunt pencil from behind his ear, spinning me around very rapidly, he drew a little map on my back, at the bottom of a crumpled set of abstruse calculations which he pulled from his pocket, softly smoothing out the paper on my scapula, as he wrote. Spinning me back round again, he kissed each of my cheeks—as if I were French—and he presented the rumpled instructions to me, leading me to the door, and pointing down the cobblestone street in the right direction, and to the left. Staggered as I was by so many abrupt changes in the city’s already weird geometry—though less drunk now from last night than dizzy—he invited me back into the office and offered me a cup of café noir to clear my head. This so-called coffee was a thick blend of coal tar derivatives and caffeine that he kept constantly warm and liquefied in a shiny steel urn, with the aid of an implacable spirit lamp and a bright blue—almost gem-like—flame. We exchanged apologies and had a jolly good laugh about our initial confusion and I thanked him for the disgusting sludge and the map. Before I tipped my hat and left for the Post Office, as a further gesture of interdimensional amity, he patted my chest and tapped the side of his nose, beckoning me—“Ein Moment,”—to stay, so he could show me something he had written on the relationship between Mass (Man), Energy (mE), and the Speed of Light (See, squared?), that he dreamed of publishing in one of the scientific periodicals he had scattered all over the floor like frightened geese. After memorizing the essential formulae—for use and abuse elsewhere—I handed the manuscript back to him, with my card inserted beneath an as yet unpatented paperclip, nodding slowly, “Interessant, sehr interessant.” I asked him if he liked his job. “Manchmal,” he shrugged, “Zomtimes.” From the pile of papers on his desk, he extracted a white rectangle tied up with a double layer of red tape, awaiting approval. He blew the dust away from the

edges. Even with my laughable German, I could tell it was the patent application for a perpetual motion machine that powered a prayer wheel—perhaps viceversa—submitted ages ago—before the clerk was born—by a local man. “I say, old chap, do you suppose that gadget will work?” “Nie. Nein. No chanz. Nott in zis uniferse,” he replied, pausing, reconsidering, turning the plans right-side-up on my lap, before continuing with a twinkle, “Aber vee are goink zees planz to aproof, anyvay—vor vun.”

[Here, he hands me his official stamp.]

“Zee infentor ist—Was ist das englische Wort?” “Doolally.” “Danke schön—Doolally—aber his hard ist in zee ride place, ja?” “Ja.”

[Thud.]

Thus, after we made everything currently illegal in physics (and metaphysics) at least theoretically legal and placed the application in a wire tray marked RAUS, we bowed and we made our fond farewells, as if we also had been old friends. In fact, I so enjoyed our curious encounter that I carried my delight out into the slippery street, around the corner, around another corner, another, and another, seemingly spiraling inward, as instructed, and into the Post Office. Once I had sent my malicious postcard to Mr. Kurtz on its merry mission, I emerged far away, in the far future—in an imaginary world of possibilities—far from our present perspective—and spiritual condition—about as far distant as

day is from night, and wrong is from right, although they are both connected. I came out into the crisp and cold air of a New Year, again—just as tinkerbell rang, again—and the cuckoo sallied forth from his door and his little black hole in the clock, again—and he cuckooed, again—as if on cue, again—to keep another despondent young dreamer dreaming, again—like you, again—assigned to work on a holiday, again—to keep the reader diverted from sadness for a short while, once the dream ends, and there seems to be nothing delightful left in all of Creation: except for a thin pink cloud of self-conscious chaos, a You and an I, inclining slightly more towards hope than despair.

***

CATH NICHOLS

IN THE DEEP, DEEP FOREST OF THE HEART

You are kissing on me and I wonder if a ghost can have a future.

We think so much about the past, and ghosts are trapped, they say, until a living person frees them, learns the secret of their unjust death,

and this is also the story of love told over and over: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, trapped in a tower, a forest, a glass box,

frozen in past-presence until someone learns the secret of their unjust fate and does the thing that will reverse

the curse, unlock the future:

a kiss to un-do magic, dissolve the tower, the forest, the sleep,

un-make, un-frame, un-build the wall, the glass, the stones. The right lips might confound

a story’s height, its depth, the needle and the brazen bed, the cursed comb and magic ribbon,

the poisoned apple. So much for one kiss to do! Love can unlock the past,

wake a person up, but will this?

***

FOUND POEM: FROM LUCY BURKE’S TRADE UNION MANIFESTO

An increasingly aggressive managerial culture that values metrics, outputs and productivity but not people is bad for everybody, but it is particularly damaging for disabled staff. Our employers demand more and more from us at the expense of our health, well-being and personal lives. We face excessive workloads and intolerable, competing pressures to meet targets for research, teaching, grant capture, recruitment, retention. And the reward for success? More work, more pressure, less time. And resilience workshops.

***

STEVEN RIEL

ABEL HAS ALMOST NO IMMUNE SYSTEM

i.

The red footnote on the label of the miracle drug catches my eye: Abel’s in the 33 percent who vomit up nearly every bite. Mom and Dad told me he sobbed on the long-distance call before a catheter was tunneled between his clavicle and first rib so he could feed through his subclavian. Other clinical words collide into Eden, after pancreatitis, toxoplasmosis. After Abel’s insurance company couldn’t dropkick him fast enough. His lover works late hours to cover their mortgage. Wouldn’t you?

I borrow shekels to board the Shuttle to their condo. Abel lies upstairs, starving.

Just levering his bony 99 pounds into the bathtub hurts us both. After another 24 hours, when anyone less “gone” would have moaned I’m hungry, the feeding machine arrives: aqua plastic box, like a vacuum cleaner; gleaming steel caddy; plastic tubes; plastic bags of almost fluorescent white nourishment. Welcome to the family.

A nurse swings by to run through instructions as intricate as life: 1) Interlocking ts, 2) kept sterile with alcohol wipes, 3) spill into Abel’s core. Oh, that feels cool, he murmurs.

This mission is a booby trap,

when each step must be followed to the iota to foil microbes. Is it possible to be precisely prophylactic forever and ever, and what if someone sleepy and/or absent-minded stumbles through what’s now second shift? How to gauge a turn for the worse? I am my brother’s keeper.

ii.

Yes, my name is Cain, and I’m calling about Abel. Yes, I do have his patient ID. I want to see the bill the home-health company submitted, the 3-D pie charts ing blazoned at board meetings to extol how much moolah was pinched by discharging failing policy-holders into the land of Nod.

For the criminal trial, our lawyers subpoena

this quarter’s financials, issue interrogatories to establish bloated profits the LLC diversified, how many day spas it spawned east of Eden, how many golf courses begat among thistle and thorn.

iii.

All evidence will be offered to Adonai.

iv.

I am the wobbly tiller in Abel’s room who paces but must keep steady. With rigid fingers I hold the survival of my first rival, whose birth introduced me to the murderous scythe I swing inside.

This vigil will last days, only hours, in fact— unto dust thou shalt return. His sleek alarm clock sweeps silently on

while I scribble lists of specialists, lay siege to another Help Line’s moat.

Abel has no draw bridge, one or two white cells left to rouse. One slip, one contaminated swipe— if only I could kneel beside his bed and believe.

***

LESSON OFF ST. CROIX

i.

Schools of peach and baize parrotfish sneak by as we both follow our blond captain,

our guide, through groping orange tentacles that sting. First he showed us how to breathe,

how to hug ourselves to guard stamina & warmth. A provoked patch of seafloor

blanches, unpeels a lurking flounder. Lurid hues announce we’re submerged in

a louche element: curious durgons, black with blue racing stripes, mob us,

ogle us right back. With such simple strokes, our merman tows a life preserver

in case we wear down or freak out. Barely surviving a gale off Bermuda,

his catamaran punctured, he now views caution as one component of strength.

Nervous newbies, we dog paddle, home in on his trim, silver shorts, mesmerized

by muscular thighs.

It’s okay to gawk since we both do. What a cad I’ve been.

The Caribbean is not the pond where we learned as boys to pinch our noses,

float like dead men, & give ourselves over, against instinct, to a body of

liquid. Fearing sharks, I vowed I’d sunbathe on board, wave to you à la Jackie O.

But, tempting fate, we’re kabobs of ape-meat. I tread water, waiting to make sure

you’re fine. Bright, childlike delight relaxes

your jaw, the permanent frown my wrongs

scraped into your brow. Sea turtles wing by, their peaceful tranquility green

& sure as their shells. Awed, we pause. We’re just grasping the necessary rhythm:

first: leak; then: surface— catch our breaths, marvel as we empty masks, & watch light bounce

in each other’s eyes once more. Our path back seems almost routine. We spot the dark,

tooth-like boulder where a sandy shines through shadowed reef, where our anchored boat

sways, dozing beneath a ripening sun. Chilled tuna-wraps in hand, our captain

its a shark cruised away at the start. It doesn’t matter now we are back.

***

AFTER JUDY GRAHN

I’m not a dude I’m an amaryllis I’m not a piledriver I’m a deltoid reader I’m not an armored car I’m a disco strut I’m not a foot-soldier I’m a redstart I’m not a corporal I’m a cum cry Look at me as if you had never seen a fruitcake before I’m loaded with candied ginger and explode in the mouth

***

KEN ANDERSON

THE CURRENT

Love’s an awkward stranger in your house, at best a shy, attractive visitor invited just for a night or two, no more. He introduced himself, shook hands, and smiled, but failed to fit the chic décor, your scheme to relegate your life to simple sex. Too formal to it the heart of things, you dined with style, conversed beside the fire, then went upstairs to sleep with someone new. His warm embrace intruded on your dreams of tricks in sleek tuxedos, flashing bills. And shrugged, he turned away, his mind outside among the raw, tree-bending winter winds that swept across the grounds, invisible as that instinctive force that swells up from the dark, mysterious bottom of the soul.

What’s left you now, the only trace of love? A cryptic note—the memory of a guest whose ordinary name you’ll soon forget.

***

THE PATIENT

Release me with a scribble of your name so I can write down one for myself on a sheet of paper, file the last, and win this game. I played the part of nonchalant desire while walking down an isolated street. My watch has told me that I should retire.

Despite my alter ego’s profane prayer, I’d echo every word, the way you spoke, the way you smiled or frowned or combed your hair, but I still wear the mask I’ve learned to trust, a porcelain mask I’d like to say I broke. My watch now says to remove it since I must.

I have a porno dream that fits you well, the handsome man who visits me and then forgets the clinical world outside the cell where we recklessly drop our ironed slacks and lust

for the deep rapport that makes me well again. My watch reminds me that that’s just not just.

My father’s coldness, like a ruby rust, has coated thoughts of every man I see, corroded every topic we’ve discussed, but if I can sort the facts from fantasy, I’ll learn to love myself instead of you. My watch now says I must be someone new.

***

FRANCIS GOODMAN

REPLACED

On the bat’s back I do fly/After summer merrily. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Still in my hospital gown and mooning the parking lot, I crutched into the ER at 3:00 a.m.: a blood-caked

Gumby not so much high on muscle relaxants as laughably loose, unboned and unbidden.

The guy at the desk was all but asleep: in for a penny though not for a pound, which is what the surgeon

had done to the metal rod in my femur. A part of me had been replaced with something

new and hip—”Hey, girlfriend!” I would later joke,

having traded ion for proximity.

When I rang the bell, the attendant flinched. “Excuse me, sir. I’ve been bitten by a bat.” “Say what?”

“I’ve been bitten by a bat in this here wound.” The thing had gotten into the house, and as I lay

on a rented bed in the living room—picture a buffet with corned beef hash—Count Dracula had pounced.

The guy wasn’t prepared to be flashed. “Have you been drinking or doing drugs?” he asked.

At which point, you walked in holding a bag, the bat inside it perfectly contained.

You could trap anything, solve the strangest of problems. The creature wouldn’t keep still, and now, looking back,

I can’t help but think of it as HTT1*, a gene with wings,

the sound of the plastic like wave on sail.

(You once overturned in the Firth of Forth. It was October, and no matter what you tried,

you couldn’t right your 505.) Of course, you won’t be taken to the hospital—

pity the man who thinks that he might catch you. When the bat was tested for rabies, it wasn’t positive.

————

* The HTT gene causes Huntington’s disease when the trinucleotide repeat, consisting of cytosine, adenine, and guanine, exceeds the number thirty-five. If Huntington’s runs in your family, you have a one in two chance of having the disease yourself.

***

WHAT IN SOIL?

I’m a dirt person. I trust the dirt. —Eartha Kitt

A greenhouse requires a gardener. What in soil will we do if you have Huntington’s?

Can terror be a tool or form of fertilizer? I find myself studying you.

Is that sudden clumsiness a sign? You can’t find your keys, but you could never find them.

And your phone—your phone is like a sprinkler system without plants.

It soaks the air of some forgotten place. I assumed that I would die first.

How many medical problems can one person have? My body’s a car not worth the money

we’d have to put into it. “There’s always NPR,” you teased. “We could get a tax deduction.”

“You really think they’d want this clunker?” I asked. “For scrap, yes.”

Humor is like biting your soul until it bleeds—pleasure must pinch and perforate.

Can I say this? I took comfort in not having to be the one who leaves our son to the world.

I’m the guy who goes first on a relay team. He’s fast but not spectacular.

His one and only job is to keep the team in the race. No one re him.

***

NICOLE TAYLOR

PEER CLUB STATUSES

Our friend Shelly is returning, moving back maybe to counsel, to mentor again.

Our friend Kelly B is discouraged and may be moving across town again.

Our friend Erik is angry impatient over interruptions, over stress.

Shannon is angry and shows it on his face, then starts swearing at staff about rules, at traffic as he is asked to leave.

Young Sam is energetic, hyper-mamic schemes to be a famous rapper.

Young Matt is scheming to earn money from his family.

Brian, Tim, conservative big John are eager to play Foosball, Sorry, Chess, whatever online, on a board, a table, whatever.

Loud old Shari is anxious as she loudly in a monotone voice tells us “I have to leave in half an hour,” for dinner at her group home.

Old man Dennis is preoccupied researching health, law, social service while online for his schemes and claims.

Cookie monster Michael E is hungry. He arrives again with another chocolate salty cookie from the bakery, café next door, and then researches diet, liver care.

Michael S is also anxious and energetic, researching skull or Celtic tribal tats and tells me of his uncaring staff at his halfway house.

Our staff assistant Sandra is cautious while glaring at maniced brain injured Leslie

but dotes over depressed Helen and her smelly retriever Trixie,

and sad Randy standing bow-legged with lip curled for tobacco maybe and tells anyone he wants to be a husband, a dancer, a cowboy, an hippie organic farmer.

March 5, 2014

***

THE BLUES

A bipolar day and story.

He dressed in a royal blue Emerald’s hat and a navy or midnight shirt with denim blue jeans. He looked so periwinkle when he snapped back at Shelly and me. He walked out into the cyan sky with no clouds in view now.

June 19, 2010

***

FELICE PICANO

THE MARCHIONESS

Taken from the forthcoming novel, Pursued: Lillian’s Story

Miss Harriet B. Elder The Daily Mail & Times Ulvertston, England

December 5th, 189–

Dear Miss Elder, You called upon me yesterday eve with the news that my father-in-law, the former Earl of Ravenglass, had arrived at a peaceful end, at long last, in the prison chamber where he was kept for the past seven years. You asked if I might be able to add to the obituary of this former Lord of the British Exchequer and low-fallen great man for your readers by giving some personal anecdote or other that might serve to make him more sympathetic. I find that I am not able to do so without further tarnishing his name, but upon reflection I recalled–indeed I had never forgotten and had written down in my girlhood diary–an incident regarding his wife, when she was Marchioness, from some years ago that you might find revealing. It was in the year 184– and my Aunt Blassage from Lancaster, visited my family in the rectory here, upon the Ravenglass Manor estate. After she had gone, she

left my mother as a gift, a lovely lacework collar, made in the Isle of Man, where Aunt had recently journeyed. My mother declared it beautiful if a great waste of money. She went out insufficiently to wear it, and anyway a Vicar’s wife, as Aunt B. should well know, oughtn’t to display such Vanities upon her Person. I suggested that mother give it to Her Ladyship, the Marchioness Bella of Ravenglass, who, though she went out even less than mother, we both knew, wore such collars, and who would thereby be particularly obligated to us by its receipt. I think my mother was so surprized I did not ask the collar for own self, that she assented to my plan. The following afternoon I took it wrapped in fine piece of slightly used muslin up to the Manor House. Mrs. Ounch, the housekeeper, sought to take it from me, promising to it on, but I wondered if it would ever get past the servant’s hall, and I reminded her that at Her Ladyship’s last birth day celebration she had particularly asked me to pay her a call. It was therefore with a rather poor grace, that Ounch agreed to convey my message to her mistress, and a few minutes later I was ushered upstairs and into the winter garden, albeit it was only November, and still inordinately temperate out of doors. I would have been amazed to see the Marchioness out of her mechanical contraption of a movable wheeled wooden chair and she was not that day. She was in fact, sitting amid its surrounding pillows, and had been placed in a pool of green filtered sunlight, surrounded by oversize dracaenas, colossal rubber plants, jungles of orchidaceous vines and lianas, giant pink amaryllis and other flora and vegetation of a tropical nature that I was unfamiliar with then but have since come to know. Somewhere above us, a skylight window must have been left ajar as three quite large, iridescent, brilliantly coloured, bottle green horseflies slowly swirled about the vicinity, shaping unhurried figure eights in the pollen-mottled air. I thought the Marchioness asleep, since she was silent, unmoving and her eyes shut, but I curtseyed anyway and went up to her as close as I dared and laid the muslin upon her lap and opened it up, and quietly whispered, revealing and explicating the fineness of jet-work inter-stitched with the inky lace. Although she could be no older than five and thirty, from this near, she revealed a face covered with strangely old looking skin and a meshwork of fine lines, especially around her pursed mouth and the almost bruised, dark looking

undersides of her eyes. She smelled of Lilac Water yet also, like an older person, rather musty in fact, and there was also another, sharper and somehow Asiatic aroma from nearby. A moment later I was able to trace it as deriving from a narrow violet coloured glass vial with a carved glass stopper and also from a slender, chased silver chalice that could hold no more than half a draught of a drink. Both items were placed upon a wheeled wooden slatted table evidently constructed to complement and accompany her movable chair. I was about to stand up and go over to the vial for a closer look at the writing, which appeared from this angle to be medically prescriptive, when I felt her hand upon mine and looked up. Her great grey eyes opened slits, then wider, albeit without anything like recognition of me even though her mouth became more wrinkled as it opened slightly in an approximation of a moue. “How charming!” she hissed more than whispered. “My Lady? Ma’am? I’ve taken the liberty of ... ? And I’ve brought you a gift my mother ... ?” I touched the muslin and her large, veined hands lifted the collar before her eyes. “From the Isle of Man, my Lady. Hand made by the inhabitants, of course.” She held it up to the light. “How very intricate,” it now came out a whisper. “I accept it, yes. It will go with my ... jade taffeta bodice.” She returned it to its muslin bed, where a horsefly landed upon it. She made no effort to brush it off and when I did so, she stopped me. “Don’t you like Nature, young Miss?” “I do My Lady, very much so.” “Very much so?” “Yes, My Lady, unlike most girls I am unafraid of animals or ... anything in nature. Our dear father lectures us that we must share the world with our animated brethren.”

“Yes. So we must,” she whispered hoarsely. “And if you really like Nature ... ?” “I do.” “Then you will very much like my Precita.” So saying she moved a hand to her throat upon which she wore a large, deepgreen malachite locket, almost square, set in gold, and hung by three strands of gold beads. No sooner was the locket opened, than I saw it held some white furry object. One of her dried-blood red fingernails gently probed the centre of the locket and on the instant several limbs jumped out around it, grasping the nail closely. Immediately the large furry white thing crawled out of the locket and across her hand, and almost too quickly to follow, rushed onto her throat, crossed onto her long hair, and stopped only when atop her head where it rested long enough for me to fully make it out. I’d been greatly surprised, for it moved in a fashion unlike any other creature I’d ever seen except perhaps a spider; not quite scuttling as crabs and lobsters do upon the strand yet similar to them; unlike them, it didn’t locomote sideways and yet it went so very quickly. I could now see that it was some species of spider, though very large, quite furry and the colour of clotted cream, with a beige hue only upon its head and what seemed to be the curved gripping claws of its front arms. “You do like Nature,” she now hissed at me. “You haven’t fallen back, screaming and rushing out of the room on your hands and knees like most of the fool girls in this house.” “It’s remarkable,” I said. “In truth, My Lady, what manner of animal is it? It seems an arachnid in shape and limb but it’s so large! And furred like a mouse or ...” “It is an arachnid, as you say. A subspecies called a tarantula. But while related, it is not a whit like those of that name we know here in the old world, those black and ugly brutes with their bags of gut and blood red stain. No,” she went on, “It’s from the Sonoran desert. Do you know where that is?” “In North America, I believe, My Lady: In the north-western part of the Mexican

Empire.” “So you are intelligent after all. Do you know what it likes to eat?” “I should think,” I said, “other creatures from that locality: insects and small rodents and lizards and suchlike.” “Yes,” she hissed, “And not little girls, which is why you did not flee from it.” She paused. “Would you like to touch Precita? To pet her?” Though subtly horrified, I was most curious. “May I? I’ll be very gentle.” With a single hand she lifted the tarantula, which covered the entire back of her hand and brought it down to the muslin and slowly petted it, until I swore I could hear it purr like a kitten. “Now you may,” she said and I followed suit, amazed at its silk-like fur and its little movements as though coming closer into being caressed. “You came here not merely to call, nor simply to gift me, you’re far too intelligent a girl for that merely,” she said, as we now took turns with the spider. “It’s true, my lady, I came to ask a boon for my dear brother, Rudolf whom you may .” “How could I not him? For of late he is to be found all over this house whenever my son, Roland, is here.” “I hope, My Lady, that my brother does not displease you.” “He neither pleases, nor displeases. He is Roland’s after all and no business of mine.” I knew neither what she meant, nor how to take it, pro or no, so I went on, as we doubly caressed the furred, cream-colored arachnid. “He is of age to continue his schooling. To a college of some sort he must go, yet my father has not lifted one finger to make it so.” “He is not a good scholar?” she asked.

“Quite good, My Lady. Yet he is in want of ...” I knew not what to say and settled for, “in want of ... Patronage.” “I have not held in my hand even one shilling in more than a decade,” she said sadly, an ittance that I must say amazed me. “Even so, a word or two from Your Ladyship on the matter. To your son, Roland. Or better yet, to His Lordship. A scholar’s stipend after all, although immense to such as we, is but a pittance to …” She stopped me with another hiss, and I thought my mission lost. “He is afraid?” she asked very quietly yet very clearly. “My brother, Ma’am? I think is afraid of no one alive!” Then I understood,” You mean my father, the Vicar? Yes, he is afraid! And especially to ask anything of Lord Ravenglass, no matter how much it is needed. He fears him greatly, I believe.” “And rightly, too. For Lord Ravenglass is powerful and thus much to be feared,” she added and I thought my cause a lost one. “Still,” she went on, “It’s true that I may now and then wield an iota of influence. If only because he wishes no possible ... “ she sought for the words, settling upon, “possibly solid, provable grounds of dissatisfaction.” “Ah, My Lady,” I almost cried, lifting my hand off the creature. “My entire family would be so utterly obliged to you.” “But on condition,” she stopped my effusions. “Only that you will your brother in attending a college. For if he is as intelligent as you are, he would want it. And your parents too.” “I would like that very much, since indeed my parents do believe in girls being educated and have helped me to advance this far in the cottage-school.” “Then I shall have a little project,” the Marchioness said, and for the first time I heard a smidgen of pleasure in her voice. “Wherein I may somehow alter the way things are.”

Precita suddenly moved forward from out of her caress. And I couldn’t help but notice that one of the bottle green flies had landed nearby, as before, on a particular weave of muslin. The Marchioness lifted her hand lightly and very gently lifted mine away at the same time. Precita slowly stood up and I could see the hair on its limbs stand up too. Still, it didn’t move. Before it and thoroughly heedless, the bottle green fly turned about upon the spot of muslin, it’s feelers and antennae immersed in some area therein from which it hoped to gain sustenance. Precita meanwhile waited, and almost thrummed like a purring cat, but remained utterly unmoving the longest time. I was almost about to look away when Precita shot forward and in a half second had the fly caught between its longest palps, had turned it about, thrust out of some openings a network of glistening thread and had wrapped the fly in wet netting. It worked so quickly, now using several of its legs, that though I observed most carefully I could not make out, how the fly became so mummified. Then Precita stopped, held the fly just so before its high placed little head with five black eyes. She thrust out a single tiny near-invisible needle into the mass, and stung again and again until the fly went still, its alarmed buzzing silenced. “Now Precita shall dine at leisure,” the Marchioness said, slipping back into her languid hiss of a voice. I watched the tarantula hold the wrapped fly in front of itself as though iring its work, then crawl up her Ladyship’s arm, onto her breast, and from there into the ajar malachite box, where it settled in as though into a nest. She shut the box, then reached over for the purple glass vial and let several thick liquid drops slowly descend into the chalice, where she indolently swirled the liquid. Before she could bring the chalice to her mouth, I curtseyed, and began to withdraw. “You won’t forget my brother!” I dared to remind her, suspecting what Lethe was contained in that draught she raised to her lips. “I assuredly won’t forget neither you nor your brother,” she softly said, then

tossed back the liquid and I could smell it fully now and identify it as Laudanum from its bouquet like rotten almonds and overripe peaches. Having sipped, she went very still, although her eyes remained open, staring into some baroquely fanciful Beyond, as I slowly backed out of the winter garden. The Marchioness was as good as her word, and both my brother and I attended college. I until completion of my courses, and he for two years, before he left to obtain a commission in Her Majesty’s Imperial Navy where he has served ever since. Signed, Lady Lillian of Ravenglass

***

PATRICIA WALSH

A DANGEROUS COLLECTIVE

Juxtaposed, pint over recalcitrant pint, this fear of alcoholism seethes through instinct, kissed to oblivion the hardwired innocence eating somewhere else a trophy unmissed, voluminous language never stalls past ridicule.

It’s good to turn up, massacres abiding windfalls on results cheerily making their mark, silently alone, cursing the solitary confessions called to a wedding that everybody wants time and again a bold hitting the spark.

Swearing out of measure a cool electric stance questioning times when jollification abided, a kiss used to stamp the mark, but no more the bleeding soul deserves to know better,

this hardened anger happens for a reason.

Taking breaks under water, singing for peace, unfamiliar music wreaks into common parlance bad handwriting making a valuable mark, wishing for a clock turned back, for ever these lovely diatribes washing clean away.

Friction being all-wonderful, where is the point of blowing perpetually cold, cigarettes aside? Needing to work hard at the rubble of friendship, knowing lots of things, to sate on propriety arguments followed on a time such as this.

***

VAN ETHAN LEVY

MARGINALIZED EXISTENCE

As you legislate my legitimacy to exist, I crumble into this abyss. My death is a statistic that you underrepresent with such ease, As I scream my realities, while you tone police. Every second of every day, I die a little more inside, While you wear rainbows at your performative pride. My life is more than a representation that you claim to be an ally for, Yet, you continue to suppress me each day, even more. I watch as my body, identity and existence is marketed to fill your pockets As my tears flood these sockets. This pain will never let me be, Even with each and every plea.

***

A’JA LYONS

SENSE-HATE-SOME

I imbibe to swallow the silencing Masking the maybes, nevers, can’t, and won’t The wanting, waxing, and waning fires doused by the spit and piss of those who’ve dismissed All of me, some of me, and that which only their malice perceived

Mine eyes search for the glory of the refuge whose arrival is supposedly ordained– But it is apparent I bear the stain of a lesser God Molds of clay, piles of dust, dirt and ashes, and fecal matter faking the fantastic Only some are allowed on display

The oils I’ve poured to portray aromas of royalty To hide the disdain of shame Sins given witness and enacted Names redacted for whose benefit?

That is subjective

The touch of my skin belies the lies of my name determining a fate Worse than the death of sense of self Pieces fallen by the wayside Like tears cried when hope was quelled

Listen to the war cry of I, who refuse to die Depending on the date– my fate rests in the hands of which mind will matter and who will matter in which mind Silence can be solace or the closet locking me away for the day I become less than a memory

***

MAURICE MOORE

PAW PRINTS

It was chiller than usual on de old Notsink farm this evening. All de lil churen and most farmhands huddled round de fire ta hear de old woman’s story. Dat old sonofbish only charged folks from dees parts bout a gallon of clean water, and maybe a bag of tobacco for one of his lil tales. -pops tongue- Was all people could afford at dat time mind you. -laughs- Heck, dat Old gal would jus been elated if all yall did was let em pick roots ovah back yonder. Even signed for folks who beez a lil hard of hearing like me wit no extra charge of course. -smileAnyhow, our teller pulled a shimmering copper-colored pouch from dey left pocket and loaded dey dark cheeks wit tobacco ta begin dis tale.

Old Woman: -Spits in slop cup- In the sleepy little town of Notsink, North Carolina. And, thirty minutes past curfew mind you, two lovers embrace with a kiss before parting ways. -Spits in slop cup-

Devanté: Finna kiss yall goodnight ... if dat’s ok?

Jamal: -giggles- Cool, cool.

Devanté: I know you been thinking bout it too.

Jamal: Ok, but hurry before one of my Moms catches us.

Devanté: -kisses Jamal than backs away slowly- See, that was nice.

Jamal: -giggles- Yes, it was cool.

Devanté: -whispers- Pick you up same time Friday?

Jamal: -silence-

Devanté: -smirks-

Jamal: Ok. Friday at eight for -mockingly- Death Demons Five!

Devanté: Then it’s a date!? Wait, no, make dat date number three!

Jamal: -sighs- Yes, Devanté it’s a date. -rolls eyes- I don’t know why yall like those horror flicks so much. You know dey do make films where people do other thangs sides gettin all bloody.

Devanté: -flirty- I know, I know. -giggles- But I like de way yall squeeze my arm when ya scared.

Jamal: -giggles- Imma head-on in fo my Mamma break de porch light.

Devanté: -struts to the gate, stops, turns, and winks at Jamal-

Jamal: -rolls eyes and walks in the house- Later, man.

Devanté: -thinking out loud- Ohh, yes, my boy was killin it tonight. Gotta do sum thing special for my turn. -Slams rusty red truck door and speed off into the night blasting Punk music-

Old Woman: -Spits in slop cup- Was unusually dark on dis road tonight. Devanté had bout another fifteen minutes to go before makin it back home ta the other side of town. -side eyes- Jus enuf time to make his curfew anyway. Tonight was Jamal’s turn ta take lead and plan de date. And plan it he did. -Spits in slop cup- First, veggie burgers and double almond butter shakes at Belladonna’s then Blood Fangs Part Two at de new drive-in. laughs- Chile, nearly crushed Devanté’s arm he was so scared by dat movie. Guess, he was tryin to empress his Lil Devanté. Little did he know he already had his heart. -Spits in slop cup-

Bout a mile from his house. Devanté noticed a copper-colored fog startin ta rise from de ground outta nowhere. -Spits in slop cup- He sped up turning on his high beams, but still could not see anything. Sept what looked like a cloud of copper glitter. He slowed down, but it was too late. Bang! Crashed right smack into dat old oak tree! -Spits in slop cup-

He was out for an hour or so before he woke screamin in pain. His head was all bloody; resting on the steering wheel makin dat horn blow. Took him a while

before he felt de fire on his back. He tried to move but he couldn’t. Dat Boy was pined in tighter than sardines I tell ya! -Spits in slop cup-

Devanté: -screams- Help! Somebody help me! -in agony- I’m burnin up!

Old Woman: -Spits in slop cup- Next thing the copper smoke returned smellin jus like roses. The shimmering smoke quickly covered his badly burnt skin entering through all of his pores like tiny copper worms. -Spits in slop cup-

Boom! The truck was knocked ten feet back from de old oak tree. The metal door started movin up and down makin de windows shatter before being ripped off by somethin big!

I tell ya, dat thang pulled Devanté from de truck by his neck jus seconds be for it exploded! Devanté ed out, but he ed a large animal lickin his wounds clean. Is what he told the doctors and his Daddy. Even he thought he must have been hallucinating; cause he couldn’t believe his eyes! It looked like a bear! -Spits in slop cup- Yes, folks, a Black bear had saved our babies life! Now, I know dis sounds like a bunch of hogwash, but after inspecting the wreck; the Po Po found a bunch large paw prints embedded in the truck. Plus, der was the bite mark round Devanté’s neck too! Dat boy ed out, and next thang ya know dey was in some hospital room.

Jamal: -Knock, Knock on Hospital Door-

Devanté: -weak and voice cracking- Hey Jamal.

Jamal: -steps closer- So these de lengths yall’s go through to get out of our date?

Devanté: -winces in pain- Don’t make me laugh.

Jamal: ed yo daddy in de hall. Said I’d sit with you for a bit while he hits up the vending machine. You, ok? -nervously- I mean you gonna be ok.

Devanté: Yeah, man. Sept dey won’t let me see my face. Daddy took de mirror out of the room. Practically ripped dat sucka out de wall. -in tearsIs it dat bad?

Jamal: No. I mean you got some bruises and cuts. Look like you went bout twelve rounds wit Griffith -punching at the air- but you still cute.

Devanté: Well, why de nurses won’t look at me fo to long? What yall not tellin me?

Jamal: You on our first date? We went to dat new gallery and saw those clay bowls wit de cracks was filled in wit gold. -pronouncing slowly- K---in---tsu---gi.

Devanté: -slowly whispers in pain- Yeah, Kintsugi. Where you goin wit dis Jamal?

Jamal: Well dats what you kinda look like now. Most of your wounds are filled in, sept wit sterling copper instead of gold.

Devanté: -silence-

Jamal -quickly mutters- Also, you smell like perfume.

Nurse Pete: -over the intercom- Visiting hours are now ovah and will resume tomorrow at eight am. -chuckles- Dis means you love birds.

Devanté: -winces in pain- I see yo brother got jokes.

Jamal: Bye, see you tomorrow. -kisses Devanté on cheek-

Devanté: -winks and whispers- “Still got it.”

Old Woman: -Spits in slop cup-

***

KATHI WOLFE

TORNADO

I didn’t count on much when I was seven. I’d never be picked for softball. Who’d want

a blind kid on their team? The boys would call me “lesbo” because I stumbled in my

girly Mary Janes. My grandma would make me eat swordfish and beets. I wouldn’t

color between the lines. The sprinkles would fall off my ice cream cone. Licked

by slobbering dogs. But, cartoons with their singing cats, flying squirrels,

dancing bears, naughty birds would never

be interrupted—unless a tornado blew in.

And if a tornado did come near our house, my Mom said, she would hold its hand, my

Dad would sing it to sleep. So I knew then. Today, no one makes me eat swordfish

or beets, the sprinkles stay on my ice cream cone, I’m captain of my own team. But,

no Mom holds our plague’s hand. No Dad sings the twister that’s blown our world

apart to sleep. We must draw our own cartoons, bite into unsweetened, unsavory ice cream dreams.

***

LIBATION

On our anniversary, during our plague year, we uncork the champagne. Naked, the bubbly goes back to bed,

pulls the covers over its head. With no mask, how can it dare to sparkle? Before we danced to the barks

of kick-ass dogs. In sleep, we were honeysuckle— lovingly grazed by buzzing bees. When we fought,

we snapped like fresh peas, sizzled like deep-fried, red-hot onion rings. Even when you drove cross

country with that beautiful boy one summer, and I spent all our Christmas money on books and weed,

gave away our kitty because she meowed too loudly. Now, fighting over cookie crumbs—toilet paper—

we’re diseased dragon flies, hissing feral cats. Still, clicking our glasses, we faintly here the bubbly stir.

***

FERRIS WHEEL

When I was five, I was sure God lived at River View Beach, our town’s amusement park. If I’d created the universe,

that’s where I’d hang out. Why bless the world from inside a dark, musty church—perform miracles in hospitals filled

with blood, nasty smells, babies’ cries? When God could comfort the sick on the merry-go-round,

greet everyone with the Kiss of Peace in the Tunnel of Love, duke it out with Satan on the bumper cars,

take confessions at the top of the Ferris wheel. Forget about the loaves and the fishes! White bread and tuna

aren’t much of a treat to most kids, I thought. God would turn the loaves into cotton candy, the fishes

into hot dogs. When everyone had gone on the last ride, at closing time, Lazarus would leap through the fun house doors.

***

GREGG SHAPIRO

PISCES GIVES GEMINI SWIMMING LESSONS

Pisces likes the way Gemini looks in a racing suit, slick man-made fabric clinging to every contour, accentuating the positive attributes. Gemini doesn’t mind posing as long as Pisces promises not to splash. At the outdoor pool, the sun beats down, unyielding as a virus. Rays rearrange cells into cancerous formations of the skin. Or there are clouds, blocking that lucky old sun, threatening more water from another source.

Thunder lashes the air, formally introduces lightning as a special guest. Gemini has just as many complaints at the noisy indoor pool, chlorine reddening eyes and coating lungs. Pisces waits patiently, tapping a fin on the bottom of the pool, while Gemini tries to decide between the ladder or the diving board. Imagines the bubbles swelling from Gemini’s nose when he holds his head under for too long. Gemini worries about his drenching dreams

of the backstroke, dog paddle and dead man’s float being deferred until the seas rise. Secretly, Gemini is convinced that Pisces just wants to roughhouse, get his perfectly styled hair wet. When Gemini suggests they go to the beach, Pisces knows it’s time to concoct a new plan. One that involves waves, huge gulps of salty water, the sting and slither of something unseen under the surface, a kiss on the sandy shore that will that transport them from there to eternity.

***

BECOMING MY FATHER

I never wanted to be him. He of the yolk-soaked toast. The oily sardines and rare steaks. The insatiable sweet tooth. The bottomless hunger and thirst. Noisy chewer. Buddha profile. Thick gold chain and religious medallion. Sports fanatic. Generous cologne spritzer. Flea market hawker and change-maker. Loud laugher. Cigar smoking, cigarette sneaking nicotine dependent. The combover. The short, lit fuse. The fist. The caress. Coin collector, coupon clipper. Foul-mouthed wild child. Self-destructive. Flirt. Furious, fumbling but fulfilled father figure.

I tried to starve myself. I became an atheist. I shaved my head. I don’t run; I read. Ex-smoker. Homosexual and intentionally childless. Public poet. Protestor and activist. Pride parade float-rider; pink triangled, rainbow attired. Itinerant collector of addresses in different cities and states. Survivor and disappointment. These thoughts race through my mind every May, as the anniversary of his death

approaches. I glide past the selection of yahrzeit candles on the supermarket shelf. Convinced that words in a poem are a better source of illumination, memorialization, apology.

Only I know about the secret and constantly revised list of our shared qualities and quirks, held close to my chest like a good hand of cards. Lovers of dogs, watch and ring wearers, penny slots players, diehard Democrats, movie fanatics, monogamists, road trippers, shoe whores, graceful dancers, news junkies, joke crackers, back scratchers, chin bearded, whistlers, gear heads, chicken scratched in code and disappearing ink on edible paper, stuck to the roof of my mouth, hidden securely under my tongue like a pill, ready to be swallowed or denied if detected or unearthed.

***

STEPHEN LIGHTBOWN

SWEET DREAMS

When I was eight, I saw Dad kiss someone that was not Mum. He didn’t hide it, just assumed I wouldn’t know what it meant. He was right. Which is why when I got home I asked Mum to help me understand. Not long after, Dad moved out. For a while I would wonder if it was my fault. Ridiculous. I was not matchmaking my parents so I could get twice the Christmas presents. Besides, I’d rather have had a Dad to play with than double the toys I didn’t use. Thirty years on and I’m an adult in my forties, still looking to understand why. In that dredging period between closing my eyes and slumber these memories come back to me. My eight-year-old self is not the one that needs forgiveness, but I do it

anyway. So I can sleep.

***

FREE WHEEL

They leer from above, I’m uneasy. Red bricks leaning for a closer inspection,

this man in a wheelchair, custodian of pavements. I prefer an open road. Fewer high-rise inspectors.

About two floors up, the building to the left. An exercise bike on a balcony. Observing.

I swear it is watching me. Or is it us. Maybe it wants escape. The claustrophobia

of a busy balcony with wilted hanging baskets, ironing board, table, neglect. An aloe vera,

that seems to be thriving. Maybe, the exercise bike is jealous of my wheelchair. Faithful packhorse.

Living its purpose, carrying a load, moving forwards. I sense my chair sag beneath me, was it a shrug?

As though telling me, it’s time to go. I look again at the bike, maybe, soon. You’ll be free.

***

FALLING FROM A WHEELCHAIR

Nose in gravel I notice a broken mosaic; the gnarled root of a tree rising like a horse clearing a fence; silence where pierced pandemonium would have been if people had seen this.

Babies would have been dropped, shopping discarded, taxis throttled to a stop as hands would claw and lift me back into my chair.

I lie here, longer than I need to. My leg twitches, a telegram to tell me it is in pain.

A pain I don’t have to .

I lift myself back into my cushion

as though I never needed help.

***

CAIT GORDON

KEEPER OF THE GATE

Keeper of the gate, how much longer shall we wait in this exclusionary state made by the keeper of the gate?

Keeper of the gate, will your attitude abate? For we cannot negotiate with you, O Keeper of the Gate.

Keeper of the gate, outside, we shall congregate, encourage, and motivate despite the keeper of the gate.

Keeper of the gate,

your motivation is hate. I will never lie prostrate before the keeper of the gate.

***

JACKIE CHOU

THE POET ALCHEMIST

A diaphanous veil drapes over your verses. The light of my radar reveals their true meanings.

You’re a mogul rolling in your wealth of diction. Your metaphors and rhymes lack empathy and comion.

Oh, you alchemist stewing poison in your pot. Just who will you feed With your dangerous words?

***

ADVICE FOR THE WRITER

Weave a dream of rainbow colors Create sparks with your pen Light up the darkest times and hearts Do not get stuck on logic but paradoxes Think vibrantly like birds of paradise Touch the sky despite your disabilities Don’t discard your stardust Carve your words into wet gravel No critical glance can skin you alive Don’t beat yourself up for lollygagging A haiku is better than nothing Don’t let the air eat your ion Read this poem backwards

***

BEAU DENTON

NOT GAY

Skinny jeans aren’t a good look for me. The dressing room lighting doesn’t help, so stark and precise, no shadows to soften where my body curves and folds back in on itself. I hate what I see in the mirror: the rigid denim that broadcasts how my legs are twiggy down toward the ankles but stocky at the thighs, and the vintage, too-tight t-shirt that makes my torso feel giant and my arms feel like straws. “I think I’m losing circulation in my legs,” I say. “You might have to carry me out of here.” “I can do that,” says my friend Eric, changing in the next room. “I’ll need you to cut mine off later, though. Why’d we ever agree to this?” “We’re emo kids now, ?” I say it as a joke, self-conscious about trying on a new identity, but it’s true. We’re headed to a concert later tonight, and it was my sister Kathryn’s idea to hunt down skinny jeans at Goodwill. I’ve fallen in love with emo music—gorgeous boys singing sad songs on guitars, high-energy groups with catchy melodies and sarcastic lyrics, and darker, angrier bands that punctuate their songs with guttural screams—and I’m intrigued by the teenaged fans at shows, the moody misfits who seem to have finally found the one place where they belong. Eric and I are hoping the jeans will help us belong there, too. “Right, right. I almost forgot,” he says, as I hear his door creak open. “You done in there yet?” I find Eric in front of a mirror in the hallway, and we stand side by side as we look at ourselves and each other. He sounded unsure in his dressing room, but I’m not surprised to see that he looks great, the new jeans hugging his slender legs, the t-shirt tight enough to show off his muscles. We catch each other’s eyes in the mirror, and a small but sure smile plays at his lips.

Sometimes I feel like everything—identity, fashion, life—is a game for Eric, a game he knows he’ll be good at. It was one of the first things I noticed when we met a couple years earlier. He was the new kid in our church youth group, whom all the boys liked joking with and all the girls liked flirting with—handsome and charming, but goofy enough to be approachable. His acne and pinched voice, and the way his eyes and nose sometimes look scrunched together over his mouth, all suggested that his coolness would not be too intimidating. Still, the first time I visited his home and saw the weight bench in his bedroom, the edgy Axe deodorant he sprayed on, and the ease with which he walked shirtless around the house, I wondered why he’d chosen me to be his friend. I still wonder that sometimes, but for the most part I don’t mind having a friend who’s more confident and better looking than me. Seeing myself next to Eric in the mirror, I can almost forget how much I hated my new clothes just a minute ago. Maybe something of his appeal rubs off on me, and I’m more attractive in his proximity. Or maybe it’s just that, if Eric likes me, man boobs and all, I can worry less about what others might think. Because he’s the coolest guy I know, and he’s my best friend.

*

Emo bands have no shame in singing about late-night encounters and stains on sheets, or the agony of unrequited crushes, or the bitter fallout of a breakup. It’s part of what draws me to the music. In the rest of the world sex is a mystery, not to mention a sin, but in some of my favorite songs (like Fall Out Boy’s “wishing to be the friction in your jeans,” or Chris Carrabba wailing “I wish that I was anywhere, with anyone, making out”) it seems like sex—with all its kindred activities and requisite pinings—is the only real and honest thing in the world. A raw ardor sets emo bands apart from other genres and stirs up longing and lust in their listeners, including me, a 16-year-old who’s never had sex, never really had a girlfriend. Eric is spending the night, and we decide to go for a swim before bed. It’s after midnight, and my mom and sister are both asleep, so we opt for skinny dipping,

leaving our swimsuits and towels piled on the patio. I like the rush of being naked outside, the reckless freedom and potential trouble, and I know Eric likes it, too, even if we never talk about it. Which of course we don’t, because talking about it would mean having to flesh out the bounds and intent of our nakedness. I don’t how it happened the first time we got naked together. Did we discuss it then? Or was it a silent dare that somehow turned into a silent routine? Eric cups his hand over his crotch, a too-late gesture of modesty, and eyes the pool. “Is it cold?” he asks. I dip a foot in the water, which is chillier than I prefer. It’s a warm night, but we had a rare Florida cold front earlier this week. “A little,” I say. “Not too bad, though. I bet it’ll feel nice once we’re in.” I’m always enchanted by pools after dark: the privacy, the electric blue ripples lit from below, the sense that—especially when nudity is involved—I am beyond the normal functioning of the world and the rules that govern daylight. I step off the ledge, dropping feet-first into the water with a small splash, and Eric jumps in after me. His face is shadowy above the surface, his body a flash of white below, vaguely human-shaped but mostly abstract. I was wrong about it feeling nice: the water is colder than I expected, and I know neither of us will want to stay in for long. We drift around in silence for a couple minutes, soaking up the night and the giddy, tingling feeling that comes with free-balling underwater. I lean into a back float, my face, belly, and dick jutting out of the water, my arms pumping to keep myself buoyant. Eric laughs and mimics me. “It looks like a turtle,” he says, looking at himself, and I glance down at mine and see what he means: a shriveled head peeking above the surface, huddled against its shell. I sink back into a dogpaddle and turn to face Eric just as he starts swimming away, toward the wall. He slides along the concrete until he finds a jet, then he places his hands on the brick ledge and lifts himself partially out of the water, his crotch level with the incoming stream. Eric is less timid than me when it comes to seeking out pleasure, which I like about him even though it makes me nervous sometimes. “Having fun over there?” I ask. “Shut up, it feels good,” he says, and then we’re both quiet, me watching from behind as he lets the water pressure work its magic. I’ve tried that before,

leaning my penis against the jet. It felt good but hurt a little, too, and it seemed uncomfortably close to masturbation, a taboo I wouldn’t dare commit in front of my friend. “It’s too cold tonight,” says Eric, pulling himself out of the water, and even in the dark I can make out the tan line at his waist, freckled ivory giving way to a paler, brighter white. I follow him onto the patio and we dry off, our backs to each other, then put our swimsuits on and walk inside. For a few months now, it’s been part of our routine when we spend the night together, in his bed or mine, to trade backrubs and talk about the day or whatever is on our minds. There’s nothing erotic about it, at least I know there isn’t for him and I try to assure myself there isn’t for me. It’s just something to do when we’re not ready for sleep, another ritual we seem to have stumbled into without much discussion, and I think we both enjoy having someone to touch. Eric climbs on my back and starts massaging me first, and we’re quiet until I start to feel myself growing hard. Conversation would help occupy my mind, keep me from getting too caught up in the moment or reading more into it than I should. “When’s the last time you looked at porn?” I ask. This isn’t locker room talk. We won’t be trading tips about the best websites or strategies for hiding our browsing habits. Eric and I are ability partners, which is something we learned about in youth group, like a buddy system for sexual purity. Knowing someone is going to ask about it is supposed to be a deterrent, so we check in with each other every couple weeks. “I don’t know, a few days ago I guess,” he says, kneading his hands into my back. “Last week, too. You?” “I jerked off the other day, but I haven’t looked at porn in a week or so.” Now Eric’s hands are at my lower back, gripping my sides. I inhale, holding my breath and trying to minimize my acreage of flesh. “We really need to quit that,” I say. “I know. I don’t even like doing it, really. I always feel terrible after.” “Me too. It’s kind of nice for a few minutes, but then I feel like crap. That’s how I know I shouldn’t be doing it.” Sometimes I wonder if these conversations accomplish anything. They always go the same way, and no matter how much we talk about it, neither of us seems any closer to quitting. I like knowing that we’re responsible for each other, though. We’re in the trenches together, waging

war against lust. We both signed purity contracts in youth group about a year ago, and that’s how it felt, like we were g up for war. It was the culmination of a month-long sermon series about sex and dating, and it ended with an altar call of sorts: a stack of contracts up front, an invitation to come forward and pledge ourselves to remain abstinent—free of sex, masturbation, anything that might stain our purity—until marriage. Eric and I walked to the altar at the same time, along with most of the other kids, and we knelt next to one another in prayer before scribbling our names. I gave him a long hug after, and it felt like a holy moment, full of resolve and hope. Eric rubs his palms quick and light across my back, signaling that he’s done, and then he slides off and plops onto his stomach next to me, ready for his turn. I sit up and straddle the small of his back. “How are things with Vanessa?” I ask. That’s part two of our ability check-ins: First we talk about porn, then we make sure neither of us is going too far with girls. Eric’s been bouncing from one crush to another for a couple years, but it’s starting to look more serious with Vanessa, a girl from youth group. I don’t like how much time Eric spends with her, but it helps knowing that she signed a purity contract, too. “It’s good,” he says. “We were kissing again the other night, and it started feeling pretty intense, so we stopped and talked about it. Neither of us wants to do something we’ll regret.” “That’s great, man.” I work at Eric’s back for a few seconds in silence, iring and envying his muscles, then trying to think about anything else besides his muscles. When I reach for his arms I can feel him flex his biceps, never afraid to show off, and I force my hands to not linger. “What about you?” Eric asks. “You still seeing Jess?” I work with Jess at the Shake Pit, a local favorite for burgers and ice cream. We started hanging out a few weeks ago, holding hands on our breaks and even kissing in the parking lot a couple times. I feel awkward with her—we don’t have much in common, I’m not as attracted to her as I should be, and I don’t even know if she’s a Christian—but I like that Eric and I are going through the same thing. “Yeah, that’s been really good,” I say. “We kissed again the other night, but not for too long. I think we both want to take it slow.”

*

Another night, Eric and I sneak out for a walk before bed. The sneaking might not be necessary, because we really are just going for a walk, but it makes it feel like an adventure. “If we ever get caught,” says Eric, once we’ve rounded the corner, “everybody’s gonna think we’re out here getting high or something.” “I know. It’s kind of sad, right? Going for a walk is our big rebellion.” “We’re so lame,” Eric says, letting out a mock groan. We cover the few blocks up to Manatee Avenue, one of the main drags through town. The four-lane road is well-lit but quiet, hardly any cars out this late. We wait for a pickup truck to speed past, a enger hollering something I can’t understand through the open window, and then Eric and I take long looks in both directions: nobody else in sight. Without a word, we walk in sync to the middle of the road, unzip our pants, and start peeing on the median. It’s what our nighttime strolls always build to: an act of flash and daring, another stab at something like rebellion. “You need to poop?” I ask, watching as our parallel streams splash onto the concrete and form two puddles, then two creeks, then one small river. It was the highlight of my week last time, Eric vaulting our casual exhibitionism to a whole new level by popping a squat right here in the middle of the road. “No, I wish. You?” “No, I did earlier.” “Lame. I’ll save it up next time.” Our streams start slowing around the same time, a few final spurts before they trickle toward silence, and I shake off my last drops. “Three shakes and you’re playing with it,” says Eric, zipping up his jeans and laughing when I give him a shove. Back in my room, we both strip to our boxers and climb into bed. When Eric straddles me and starts rubbing my back, it isn’t until he pauses to scratch his balls that I realize he has an erection. I have one too, though I’ve barely noticed since I often grow hard during our back rubs. I usually try not to think about it,

and Eric’s nice enough—or he feels awkward enough?—to not draw attention to it, but I know it’s obvious sometimes when I brush against him or when I’m sitting on his back. Now Eric scratches at his boner, and I wonder if this time he’s trying to draw attention to it. “Well hey there,” I say, hoping my tone sounds jokey, mostly disinterested but maybe a little intrigued. Eric climbs off my back and lies down, and once I roll over he reaches toward me and slides his hand into my boxers. Without losing a beat I do the same to him, and his penis feels both foreign and comfortable in my palm, somehow novel and already known at the same time. We stay like that, both of us perfectly still while we grip each other, for what must be about a minute, though I can’t tell if it feels like seconds or hours. It would be wrong to call what happens next oral sex, because it’s more like a science experiment. Eric crawls down until his face is at my waist, then he peels back the front of my boxers and takes my penis into his mouth. With no movement and little suction, he mostly just stays there for a bit—maybe 20, 30 seconds—while I lay back, frozen, not sure what to feel or what to do next but not wanting the moment to end. He’s been growing his hair out, shaggy and flat down his forehead like some of our favorite singers, and it tickles me just below my belly button. I wish that wasn’t the detail I’m focusing on, with something so new and strange and kind of wonderful happening, but it is. After Eric removes his mouth and lies back next to me, I can tell from his movements, and from the sound of fabric stretching, that he’s pulling down the front of his own boxers. I wonder if he initiated this game not because he wanted to grow more acquainted with my penis but because he wanted to learn for himself how it feels to be inside someone’s mouth like that, and he probably knew that if he did me first he wouldn’t have to ask me to return the favor. We wouldn’t have to talk at all. When I go down on him, I’m too nervous to enjoy or even think about what I’m feeling. I don’t want to seem earnest or eager, but I want him to know that I am happy to play this game whenever he wants, so I try to copy him move for move: keeping my mouth wrapped around him for half a minute or so—all but counting to 30—and willing myself to not start bobbing my head or brushing my tongue against him like I want to.

We still don’t talk, and once I’m next to him again we’re touching only at our arms and feet, both of us now holding our own penises. Without thinking, motivated by curiosity and a sudden need to add sight to all the other senses in play, I reach behind me and turn on the lamp. I’m worried that he’ll be mad, or that the light will make everything too real, but Eric doesn’t move while we look down at each other. I’ve caught glimpses of him before, when we’re skinny dipping or changing or peeing next to each other, but never like this. The flatness of his stomach lets his penis stand tall and distinct, and for a moment I’m distracted by the swell in my own belly, the way it mounds into view when I look at my penis. I turn back toward Eric, forcing myself to focus, to soak up as many details as possible. “Yours might be a little longer, but I think mine’s thicker,” I say, and he doesn’t say anything. Then we’re both quiet again, sizing each other up, until he reaches over my shoulder and turns off the lamp. First the light, then my voice: I wonder if I’ve breached our silent arrangement, if Eric will grow distant and want to go to bed, so I’m relieved when he pulls at my arm and then rolls over, guiding me on top of him while he turns onto his stomach. At first I think he wants another massage, a return to something more familiar, but then he lifts his waist, pushing himself into me, and I realize he has one more base he wants to cover. First we used our hands, then our mouths, then our eyes, now we’ll use our whole bodies. I enjoy feeling Eric beneath me, as I have on so many other nights, only this time I’m hard and pressed against him and neither of us seems to care. His boxers are still pulled up at the back, but the fabric is thin and soft, and I can feel his warmth against my flesh. I can also feel him clenching. He’s willing to have me against him but not in him, not like this. I manage a few small, tentative thrusts —I’m a little nervous about noise and not sure what he wants me to do—and then I climb off and we trade positions. Eric settles on top of me and practices his own gentle thrusts. Like his, my underwear is still up at the back, and as much as I want to savor having him on me, pressed against me, I wonder if we’re ready for more. “You can pull my boxers down if you want,” I say. “No, it’s all right. That’d be weird.” He pushes against me one more time, two more times, then climbs off and falls back at my side. Now I’ve done it. Eric could forgive the intrusive light, and he could forgive the

first time I spoke, since size comparison seems normal enough, just a bit of competition among boys. This time, though, my words were an invitation, maybe even an ission of desire. I’ve disturbed whatever magic we were sharing, and I am starting to feel desperate, not ready for it to end. Nothing else to do, then, except press the issue. “It’s not gay if you’re the one on top,” I say. Is that something I read online? That you can fool around with another guy and still not be gay, as long as you’re the one humping or receiving oral sex? As long as the other guy plays the part of the girl? Eric is polite enough to not ask the obvious follow-up: If it’s not gay for him because he’s on top, what does that make me? “Still seems gay,” he says instead. I hear him readjust his boxers, putting himself back inside, and then he rolls over and turns toward sleep.

*

In emo world, boundaries that seem rigid elsewhere become a little more permeable. My sister adds a few streaks of purplish red to her hair, Eric and I browse the women’s section of Goodwill for new jeans, and at concerts I start noticing guys in the crowd—other boys my age—with painted fingernails. My favorite male vocalists sing in a high, vulnerable pitch, and some of them routinely don makeup and eyeshadow. That might be why, even though I still love the music, I grow leery of emo culture. I never advance beyond skinny jeans and tight t-shirts, and even that is a short phase for me, because I worry that it’s a slippery slope: first the jeans, then makeup and painted nails, then I forget who I’m supposed to be, forget that a Christian man is strong and pure and masculine. A Christian man never wants to hold his friend’s penis.

*

Eric waits until I’m parking at the movie theater, and then he reaches forward to turn the music down. Let’s take these lines and draw ourselves out of here, sings Emery, my favorite band, quiet now but still audible. “Hey,” says Eric, “what would you say if I told you I had sex?” His voice sounds shaky, and I think I hear it crack. This is a confession, not a boast. It takes a moment for his words to settle in, and then I think about the purity contract in his bedroom and feel my eyes begin to water. “Really?” I ask, stalling for time. “Yeah, it started a few nights ago.” “What happened?” I’m not asking for details, though I might want to later. I’m asking how Eric let his guard down. “I don’t know, man.” He looks out the window, and it’s clear he doesn’t want to be talking about this, doesn’t want to face my questions, but that’s what it means to be ability partners. “We’d been kissing a lot, I guess. Then we were watching a movie the other night, kind of cuddling and stuff, and her hand was ... down there. She asked if I wanted her to move it, and I said no.” “Oh. Well that’s what we’re supposed to do, right? Just say no?” It’s a bad joke, but I feel the need to lighten the mood. Eric forces a laugh. “At least I got that part right.” We both stare forward, me focusing on a lovebug that’s smeared across the windshield. I’m trying not to think about the time that my hand, too, was down there. Emery chimes in from the background: I’ve kept the best parts and play them in my mind. We’ve never talked about that night, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Eric has barely thought about it since then. I’m sure none of it was as charged and heady for him as it was for me, because for him it wasn’t about me. It was about feeling horny and restless and reaching out for the nearest body—just a dry run for the real thing. “I bet it was hard to stop after that,” I say.

“I mean, I wanted to stop. We both did. We talked about not doing anything we’d regret, but—I don’t know. It all happened really fast.” I can’t tell if he’s tearing up now too, or if it’s only the streetlights reflected in his eyes. “I just never thought I’d give in that easy.” “I still love you, Eric,” I say, trying to our youth pastor’s advice for this scenario, “and God loves you even more. This isn’t going to change that. Next time you’re feeling tempted, just give me a call and we’ll figure it out.” Focusing on my role here—older and wiser and more faithful than Eric, ready to rein him back in—helps me ignore what might be a bolt of jealousy. Whether I’m jealous of Eric for the new experience or jealous of Vanessa for getting to be with him in that way, I don’t know and don’t care to wonder about. It’s time to go inside, so I reach over and pull Eric into a hug. His arms tighten around me, he leans his head on my shoulder, and I might be tearing up again, either that or the tang of Axe is stinging my eyes. “I’m really glad you told me,” I say. “I love you, Eric.” “Thanks, man. I love you too.” Eric checks his hair in the mirror before we climb out of the car. It’s a muggy night, and my skin feels sticky before we’ve even crossed the parking lot. I’m trying not to picture him and Vanessa in bed, trying not to wonder if Eric felt different after they slept together, like he and I now occupy separate worlds. Once we’re in line for tickets, I ask him one of the questions I’ve been curious about but afraid to bring up. “How was it?” “Not gonna lie, it felt really good.” He looks at me with his face down and eyes raised, his mouth pursed in a little smile. He’s stating the obvious, sex feels good, but is maybe a little nervous that it’s so true for him. I don’t know what else to say, so I pretend to search my wallet for ticket money. Emery is still playing on a loop in my mind: It scares me to think that you could find takers other than me, better than me.

***

JAMISON WOLF

THE RED THREAD

When I find the red thread, I’m not sure what to do. I’ve been walking along the same path for so long that I no longer believe my own eyes. Behind me and in front of me, the path is the same. The clouds are filled with storms that have yet to happen, my feet have blistered and I’ve grown accustomed to the pain. It is all that I know. I almost trip over the red thread. I’m compelled to pick it up. It’s the first pop of colour that I have seen in so long.

When I pull on it, the red thread loops itself around my finger and ties itself in a neat bow. I try to untie the thread, but it won’t give. Staring at the thread, I see that it ventures off the path that has been the only terrain that I’ve known for so long. I have no other option but to follow it and to see where it will take me. I pull on the string and someone pulls back. I stand there for a moment, wondering at the wisdom of following it where it leads, but then there is another gentle tug. I swallow my fear and step off the path.

My fear tries to fly up into me, but I push it back down as I follow the red thread. With each step off the path, I feel lighter and more myself than I have in a long time. Though I am afraid, I find my curiosity growing with every tug that I feel. As I move forward, there is a light in front of me that only grow brighter until I have to shield my eyes. I stop and wonder if I will go any further when someone tugs on the red thread once more. I know that I’m being asked to walk into the light and for a moment, I want to turn back, to find the path and continue on the same path but then I wonder what is at the end of the thread, what is waiting for me? Or whom?

I swallow what remains of my fear and I take one step and then another. Soon, the light is so brilliant that I can no longer see and yet someone tugs once more on the red thread and as I step forward, The light is blinding but so warm and beautiful upon my skin. This time, I pull on the thread and you step forward to meet me in the light. Looking at the red thread that links us, for the other end of the red thread is tied in a bow around your own finger, I wonder if that thread has always been waiting to be found so that we would find each other.

***

CONTRIBUTORS

ALEATHA LINDSAY (Cover Artist) is an Atlanta based award-winning multi-disciplinary artist, independent curator, disability advocate, and published author. She is a graduate of Georgia State University, Russell Sage College, as well as Savannah College of Art & Design where she holds a Master of Arts in Creative Business Leadership. Deaf from the age of two, she credits her early exposure to the arts with helping her overcome the challenges related to her disability. Her work has been purchased by collectors nationally and exhibited in Atlanta, New York, Spain, Morocco, and Norway. Lindsay is the Founder and Curator of The Ikouii Creative, an organization that s artists with disabilities globally and assists organizations in adopting more inclusive attitudes. [ikouii.com]

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KEN ANDERSON was a finalist in the recent Saints and Sinners poetry contest. His poetry books are The Intense Lover: A Suite of Poems (STARbooks, 1995) and Permanent Gardens (Seabolt Press, 1972). He studied under Miller Williams at LSU. His novel Sea Change: An Example of the Pleasure Principle was a finalist for the 2012 Ferro-Grumley Award and an Independent Publisher Editor’s Choice. His novel Someone Bought the House on the Island was a finalist in the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

MARK BROMBERG is a poet, editor and publisher in Athens, Georgia. He is the cohost of Athens Word of Mouth monthly open mic since 2009. His work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Big Bridge, Psychedelic Press UK, Literary Kicks NYC, and online at his blog Bellemeade Books.

BRAD BUCHANAN’s poetry, fiction, and scholarly articles have appeared in nearly 200 journals, among them The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, and Grain. An Emeritus Professor of English at Sacramento State University, he was diagnosed with lymphoma in February 2015, and underwent a stem cell transplant in 2016, which left him visually impaired and disabled. He now suffers from a chronic illness: graft-versus-host disease.

JACKIE CHOU writes poetry because it makes life more colorful. It turns the common birds and flowers of the urban landscape where she has lived all her life into heroes. Her poem “Cycle of a Tree” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Highland Park Poetry.

DAVID CUMMER’s poems have appeared in RFD, Hineni, and QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology. His poem “Unexpectedly,” which appeared in Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was also a two-time finalist in North Dakota State University Press’s Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Chapbook Competition in 2020 and 2021. [Facebook]

BEAU DENTON lives in Seattle, Washington, where he’s currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction. His work often revolves around queerness, faith (and/or the lack of it), and the relationship between past and present selves. [Website: Beau Denton | Twitter]

FRANCIS GOODMAN has new poems about Huntington’s disease in the most recent issue of Disability Studies Quarterly.

CAIT GORDON is a Canadian autistic, disabled, hard-of-hearing, and queer author of speculative fiction that celebrates diversity. Her short story “The Hilltop Gathering” (We Shall Be Monsters, Ed. Derek Newman-Stille) features a disabled protagonist and was discussed at a symposium about Frankenstein at Carleton University. Cait also ed Talia C. Johnson to co-edit Nothing Without Us, which was part of a disability studies course at Trent University and became a 2020 Prix Aurora Award finalist. When not fine-tuning manuscripts, Cait advocates for disability representation and is the founder of the Spoonie Authors Network. [Website: Cait Gordon | Twitter]

RANDALL IVEY is the author of five books, including three story collections, a novel, and a book for children. He teaches English at the University of South Carolina and directs the annual Upcountry Literary Festival.

J. IVANEL JOHNSON is the pen name for a disabled author/playwright now living in the Appalachians of NB. Her most recently published short fiction includes 2019’s “Iron Bone,” an own-voices story in the Nothing Without Us anthology by Renaissance and 2020’s “The Door to Gwunvailer” in Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse by Camden Park Press. Her poetry has appeared in such respected literary journals as THEMA, and in June 2021 her original LGBTQ/indigenous-themed “Seeing Red” was presented by Chicago’s social-justice-in-the-arts league, Third Estate Art, in their interactive literary magazine Quaranzine. [Website: J. Ivanel Johnson]

LILAH KATCHER’s poetry has appeared in Barrelhouse, Postcard Poems and Prose, Poetry International, and Gargoyle. Her flash fiction is included in the anthology Tripping the Light Fantastic: Weird Fiction by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers. She has an MFA from American University, where she worked as the nonfiction editor for FOLIO. Lilah would love to see more American Sign Language (ASL) poetry translated into English

and have her own poetry translated into ASL.

TRAVIS CHI WING LAU (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020). [Website: Travis Chi Wing Lau]

VAN ETHAN LEVY (they/them) is a trans and non-binary therapist who holds multiple licenses, LPCC & LMFT. Van has been an advocate, educator, and activist for the trans community since 2000. Van provides consultation, trainings, education and therapy both nationally and internationally. Van is also a published author with Exploring My Identity(ies), which is an interactive book designed for all people and ages to explore their identities and create safer spaces for themselves and others.

STEPHEN LIGHTBOWN is a poet based in the UK. He writes extensively but not exclusively about life as a wheelchair . In 2019 his first poetry collection, Only Air, was published by Burning Eye Books; his latest collection The Last Custodian was published this year. [Website: Stephen Lightbown | Instagram | Twitter]

CALI LINFOR (she/her/hers) is a lecturer, activist, poet and essayist living in San Diego. A mother and a widow. A queer, all purpose nerd, bookworm, and animal lover. She has published poems, articles, and short stories in Wordgathering, The Beloit Poetry Review, Manzanita Review, Ekphrasis, and others. Cali was born with a genetic disability, Duane’s Radial Ray

Syndrome, that has influenced her creative work. Her first book, A Book of Ugly Things, appears in Lantern Tree: Four Books of Poems. Currently, Cali is completing a second book of poetry entitled I, Animal. She has an MFA in Poetry from San Diego State University.

A’JA LYONS is a Black, bisexual writer from the Gulf Coast currently residing in the Upper Midwest. She is a second-year graduate student at Iowa State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing and the Environment. A’Ja is the proud mother of a highly athletically gifted and animal-loving child. [Facebook | Twitter]

MARY McGINNIS, blind since birth, has been writing and living in New Mexico since 1972 where life has connected her with emptiness, desert, and mountains. Published in over 80 magazines and anthologies including Broad River Review, Burningword Literary Journal, and Malpais Review, she has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and included in the Telepoem series recordings. She has published three full-length collections: Listening for Cactus (1996), October Again (2008), and See with Your Whole Body (2016) as well as a chapbook, Breath of Willow, published by Lummox Press for winning the poetry contest in 2017.

DANIEL EDWARD MOORE lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems are forthcoming in The Chaffin Journal, Chiron Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Bitter Oleander, Plainsongs Magazine, The Blue Mountain Review, and Drunk Monkeys Magazine. He is the author of Boys (Duck Lake Books) and Waxing the Dents (Brick Road Poetry Press).

MAURICE MOORE is currently a doctoral Performance Studies Candidate at the University of California-Davis. His creative works have appeared in Decoded Pride, EX/POST MAGAZINE, Existere Journal, bozalta Collective, Harbor Review, Rigorous, Harpy Hybrid Review,

Wicked Gay Ways, and Storm Cellar Journal. Lastly, he has exhibited at the Medford Arts Center in New Jersey; Memorial Union Gallery in Fargo, North Dakota; the International House Davis (I-House) in Davis, California; and the Christina Ray Gallery in SoHo, New York.

CATH NICHOLS has published two collections and two pamphlets. Tales of Boy Nancy (Driftwood, 2013) is a nautical history of trans men. This is Not a Stunt (Valley Press, 2017) explores growing up trans in the 1970s. She teaches creative writing at the University of Leeds, thankfully, online. Cath uses a wheelchair outside the house, because of chronic pain, and is queer/pan and ND.

ERIC THOMAS NORRIS’s poems have appeared in, around, and at: Impossible Archetype, SOFTBLOW, Assaracus, The Raintown Review, Ambit, E-Verse Radio, and many other fine journals. He lives in Portland, Oregon, USA.

NAOMI ORTIZ is a Poet, Writer, Facilitator, and Visual Artist whose intersectional work focuses on self-care for activists, disability justice, ecojustice, and relationship with place. Ortiz is the author of Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press), a book for diverse communities on dealing with the risks of burnout. Her leadership style emphasizes facilitation, inclusion and spiritual growth. Numerous publications and anthologies have featured Ortiz’s writing and poetry, and her artwork has been presented through a variety of formats. Ortiz is a proud disabled mestiza (Latina/ Indigenous/ White), living in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands. [Website: Naomi Ortiz]

FELICE PICANO’s stories, novellas, and novels have been translated into seventeen languages, and he’s received awards for poetry, drama, short stories, novels and memoirs. His newest books are Songs & Poems, and the novel, Pursuit: A Victorian Entertainment. His SF novel, Dryland’s End,

was just republished, to be followed by The Betrothal at Usk. Several stories appear in new anthologies and magazines. Picano lectures on Vintage Hollywood and screenwriting. He teaches writing workshops for the West Hollywood Public Library. [Website: Felice Picano]

STEVEN RIEL is the author of a full-length poetry collection (Fellow Odd Fellow, Trio House Press), with another forthcoming in September from Lily Poetry Review Books. His most recent chapbook Postcard from P-town was published as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. Riel’s poems have appeared in several anthologies and numerous periodicals, including The Minnesota Review and International Poetry Review. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Franco-American literary e-journal Résonance.

GREGG SHAPIRO is the author of seven books including the expanded edition of his short story collection How to Whistle (Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2021). Recent/forthcoming lit-mag publications include Exquisite Pandemic, RFD, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Impossible Archetype, wards, and Dissonance Magazine, as well as the anthologies Moving Images: Poems Inspired by Film (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2021), This Is What America Looks Like (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2021) and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology From Middle America (Belt Publishing, 2021). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.

KARL SHERLOCK’s queer and disability themed writing appears in reviews and anthologies such as The Gorey Detail (Ireland), Cream City, Jacaranda, Matador, Wordgathering, Dickinson Review, South Coast Poetry Journal, Alsop, Far East: Everything Just As It Is, The Radvocate, James White Review, Assaracus, Lime Hawk, Tinge, SFWP Quarterly, and others. In 2014, Sundress Publications selected his memoir about marrying

a conversion therapy torture survivor as a “Best of the Net” finalist. Poetry instructor and Creative Writing Program coordinator at Grossmont College, Karl lives in El Cajon, California with his parrot and care-gives for his palliatively ill and blind husband, Max.

NICOLE TAYLOR lives in Eugene, Oregon. She is an artist, a hiker, a poetry note taker, a sketcher, a volunteer and a dancer, formerly in Salem’s DanceAbility. Her poems have been accepted in BareBack Journal (an online Canadian journal), Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, Camel Saloon, Cirque Journal, Clackamas Literary Review, Just Another Art Movement Journal (New Zealand), Turtle Island Quarterly, West Wind Review, and others. You can read more of her poetry via a collection of Oregon poets with written and audio poetry available online through Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

ANTONIO VALLONE, MA (SUNY Brockport), MFA (Indiana University), associate professor of English at Penn State DuBois, founder of MAMMOTH books, poetry editor of Pennsylvania English, co-founding editor of The Watershed Journal Literary Group. Published collections: The Blackbird’s Applause, Grass Saxophones, Golden Carp, and Chinese Bats. Forthcoming: American Zen and Blackberry Alleys: Collected Poems and Prose. In progress: The Death of Nostalgia. [Email]

PATRICIA WALSH was born in the parish of Mourneabbey, in north Co Cork,and educated at University College Cork, graduating with an MA in Archaeology. She is a member of the LGBT community in Cork. Her poetry has been published in Stony Thursday, Southword, Narrator International, Trouvaille Review, Strukturrus; Seventh Quarry, Vox Galvia, The Quarryman, Brickplight, The Literatus, and Otherwise Engaged. She has already published a chapbook titled Continuity Errors in 2010, and a novel titled The Quest for Lost Éire in 2014. A second collection of poetry, Citizens Arrest, was published online by Libretto in 2020. Her next collection of poetry, Outstanding Balance, is scheduled for publication in

late 2021. She was the featured poet in the inaugural edition of Fishbowl Magazine, and her next novel, In the Days of Ford Cortina, will be published in late 2021.

MARK WARD is the author of the chapbooks, Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Carcass (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020) and a fulllength collection, Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, 2022). His poems have been in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Boyne Berries, Skylight47, The Honest Ulsterman, Assaracus, Tincture, Cordite, SOFTBLOW, and many more. He was Highly Commended in the 2019 Patrick Kavanagh Award and in 2020 was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry, now in its fifth year. [Website: Mark Ward]

JAMIESON WOLF is a number-one bestselling author—he likes to tell people that a lot—and writes in many different genres. Jamieson is also an accomplished artist working with acrylic paint. He is also something of an amateur photographer. His most recent works include his memoir Little Yellow Magnet and the award-winning Love and Lemonade, which won the Best GLBTQ+ Book of 2019. [Website: Jamieson Wolf | Twitter]

KATHI WOLFE’s poetry has appeared in Mollyhouse, Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, and other publications. Her most recent collection is Love and Kumquats: New and Selected Poems. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Wolfe is a contributor to the anthologies QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She was a 2008 Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer Fellow. Wolfe is a contributor with the LGBTQ paper, The Washington Blade. [Twitter]

DON YORTY is a writer and garden activist living in New York City. He’s

the author of three poetry collections, A Few Swimmers Appear and Poet Laundromat (both from Philadelphia Eye & Ear), and Spring Sonnets (Indolent Books). He’s included in Out of This World: An Anthology of the Poetry of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966-1991. His novel What Night Forgets was published by Herodias Press in 2000. Fucking and Other Poems (Indolent Books) should be out next year. His blog features an archive of current art, his own writing, and work of other poets.

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RAYMOND LUCZAK (Editor) is the author and editor of 25 titles, including Flannelwood (Red Hen Press), once upon a twin (Gallaudet University Press), Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels), and Comion, Michigan (Modern History Press). His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Impossible Archetype, and elsewhere. A thirteen-time Pushcart Prize nominee and an inaugural Zoeglossia Fellow, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [Website: Raymond Luczak | Facebook | Twitter]

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