Issue 1
- jmorielpayne
- 4 hours ago
- 22 min read
FICTION:
How to be a Life Model, By Colleen Kolba
Angle Of Return, By Gena Ellett
The Couch Lover, By James Kanady
How to operate with a Blow Mind, By Judith Roney
NON-FICTION:
Mom’s Creamy Coconut Cake Recipe, By Laura Kendall
POETRY:
Feeble, by A.S. Coomer
SE 14th Avenue Evenings -for Viva, by Brianne Manning
Paucity of Thought and the Consciousness of Lower Species, By Leonie Mikele
Your Nissan Stanza, By Meghan Kemp-Gee
Something & Julianne, By Nicole Byrne
Love Song of the Stingray, By Tamara Miles
EDITORIAL TEAM: JoBeth McDaniel, Ashunda Norris, Michelle Patnet, Jacquelyn Weathers
Kyle Hemmings' Photography
FICTION
______________________________________________________________
How to be a Life Model
By Colleen Kolba
Only take jobs at the SAIC—old high school and college classmates play The Artist in master’s programs at Columbia and UIC. You don’t want them to just assume you’re poor.
Notice that it’s never as cold as you expect, that the draft in the studio dries your sweat, makes your nipples erect.
Don’t look at student paintings, drawings, or sculptures unless you’re ready to see that they’ve noticed your left boob is bigger than the right, that they’ve somehow caricatured your vagina to be as big as your face, or how some avoided drawing what they’d call your private parts.
Just take the goddamn shower. You’ve rarely regretted showering.
Buy one of the students’ paintings of yourself. Have it framed. Wrap it in postal paper and twine and put a bow on it. Give it to your parents when you’re home for Christmas. They’re remodeling again and need new art.
Think of Magritte. Ceci n’est pas un corps. To them, you’re a reproduction. But you are a body.
Hide in the bathroom during breaks and read Emily Dickinson on the toilet; when you go out for a cigarette, the students will want to ask about what kind of art isn’t making you money, your nipple color, will you go on a date with his friend Will (he’s in finance), have you ever been a stripper?
Notice the one with thin arms and a beat-up wooden brush box, a gift from his Dutch opa. He rubs his forehead and presses his thumb to his lip. If you say yes, his thumb might press your lips.
Wear your nice black underwear even though no one will see you wearing it and no one will see you take it off.
Recede into your mind after you change each pose. Remember age five, stripping bare in the backyard, dousing yourself with the hose; remember seventeen, bikinis and rash guards on the pier while in a cold Wisconsin lake with boys and rumors of fish that could get you pregnant; remember twenty-four, Field Three on Long Island—the nude beach—and a dare that didn’t require as much courage as you thought because it turns out you didn’t notice if anyone was looking.
Acknowledge that you can’t tell the difference between the artist who asks if you prefer non-dairy milk when he buys you coffee and the artist who says to his friends: “Men fuck; women are fucked.”
You’re given one instruction. Remain absolutely still.
________________________________________________________________________
Angle Of Return
By Gena Ellett
Every Monday since I moved in with Luke eight months ago, I walk his daughter to school and we play badminton along the way. Kendra is eight years old and sweet with tangled hair and an easy toothless grin. She stays with us half the week. Her room is next to ours so sometimes Luke covers my mouth during sex so she won’t hear us, and instead he whispers in my ear baby baby baby. Like a spell. Afterwards I fall asleep with the blanket clenched between my teeth. An old habit.
In high school I never made my boyfriend wear a condom. It wasn’t out of ignorance or stupidity. I understood the risks. I volunteered at a Planned Parenthood clinic for a couple years and sat through four years of sex-ed, even took part in those activities where they paired us, boy-girl, and had the girls stand and stare into the boys eyes and say “I won’t let you come inside me without a condom on.” Everyone else had laughed through the whole thing, but not me.
At first it was exciting. And then it felt like it’d gone on for too long for me to suddenly stop and say hey, we should probably use something. And then after a few months, it was something else. I’d decided I wouldn’t get pregnant and my body had listened. I felt so calm, powerful even, like a body of water. It was a divine secret. I didn’t tell anyone. Still haven’t. Not even Luke.
The last morning I walk her to school is in early October. The kind of grey white morning where the sidewalks seem extra bare, everyone far off in beds. “You missed,” Kendra calls to me. I look down at my feet where the birdie turns in a half circle, losing momentum. She told me once that she hated being the first kid dropped off and the last kid picked up. I told her we liked to avoid the rush but then I went right out and bought her the rackets and a pack of birdies. The deal is: twenty steps towards school, two passes back and forth.
“Sorry sweetie. Must be half asleep still.” I pass back to her and she jumps to catch the birdie in the air. She turns and starts counting out her steps, stopping to yank her leggings up and kick a pinecone onto the street.
“No coffee no talkie. That’s what my mom says. Nineteen, Twenty.” She waits for me to walk ahead before throwing the birdie in the air.
“That’s funny. Your mom’s funny.” It always takes her at least three tries.
“Are you going to have a baby?” She doesn’t look at me.
“That’s a big question.”
“Dad said.”
“What’d he say, exactly?”
“That you’re having a baby. A brother or sister for me. Hopefully sister.”
We count our steps together. This morning in the dark of our room, the blanket still clenched between my teeth in sleep and in comfort, Luke asked why nothing was happening. He sounded concerned. I told him these things take time, and I felt like a body of water again but I wasn’t sure whether I was rising or sinking. If maybe I was wrong all along, about my power, about who chose.
“Lisa Chan at school has four sisters and they fight all the time.” She waves her racket in my face and grabs my hand to pull me forward.
“What do they fight about?”
“Everything. Lisa says they steal her books and rip the pages out. And she never gets to decide anything.”
“Are you worried about that?”
“No. Sixteen, Seventeen…”
What would I tell my daughters if I had them? One or two, god forbid three or four. Would I tell them to hold onto all those small secrets of their own for as long as they could? That you have to be careful when you start loving someone else because suddenly your choices aren’t entirely your own, your body becomes a shared space, the old deals you made with it become cumbersome or useless or even regretful. You lose those secrets like glass beads in a creek bed.
I throw the birdie in the air and I hit it hard. It ricochets off the sidewalk out into the road and Kendra hops after it without hesitation. I think I’m moving upwards, but how can I be sure?
I don’t hear the truck until it’s too late. She must have been humming to herself. It’s swift and I’m too far away. I’m bolted down and she hums away from me. The truck speeds on and my heart pounds, even though I don’t ask for either.
My insides are black ice and the whole scene veers away from me and just as quickly my body is in motion. It moves without me.
It launches forward and I see the purple of Kendra’s sweatshirt disappear behind the row of parked cars and I’m after her, I’m between the cars and on the road, my hand raised palm flat STOP MY DAUGHTER STOP.
The truck slams on its breaks. I can’t see her, fast fast the driver is screaming on the road. In a moment she is gone a million times.
If I’m sinking, couldn’t I find calmness in a dry riverbed? Pulse louder than anything, hands still raised, I walk in front of the stopped truck.
She is crouched on the road beside it, the birdie clutched in her hand. The driver’s mouth moves and he waves his arms in front of me but I push past him.
What they say is true: your body will know what to do.
Close by, my love sleeps. His daughter catches her breath and reaches out for me. Would I tell them about the pressure and darkness of this place? That the weight of it’s unimaginable?
________________________________________________________________________
The Couch Lover
By James Kanady
Residents were doing their nightly chores after supper to keep the old shelter as clean as possible. I was in the staff office contemplating the white board on the wall, trying to figure a way to get more yin and less yang or vice versa. On the board, resident rooms were marked by squares and the names of people on the waiting list arranged vertically on the right. That morning the Exec Director, Ms. Page, entered the office in wide-eyed horror, “Fix the energy in this house, Mister MacIntyre. We are out of balance.”
I knew exactly what she meant. The homeless shelter at that time had too many male residents, thirteen, and not enough females, two (one single, the other a single mom with two children). With that many men, everything was a pissing contest. Conversely, if the women had outnumbered the men, everything would be a drama-infused bitch fest. The house energy imbalance at either extreme was like spiritual hemorrhoids.
Contemplating a solution, I heard a high-pitched whine from upstairs─like an engine wrapped too tight. I walked out of the office at the same moment our Case Manager, Lyn Ott, walked out of hers, a puzzled look on her face. “What is that,” she asked.
I ran upstairs. In the hallway a new resident, Darryl Carter, was vacuuming. Trying to. Dust spewed in the air, the old upright Kirby’s whines growing louder, but Darryl kept on going back and forth as if nothing was amiss. I unplugged it from the wall socket.
Darryl looked dumbfounded at the vacuum and was startled seeing me.
“What the hell’re you doing?” I said.
“My chore. I work nights now and gotta do my chore in the daytime.”
I picked up the Kirby. A small throw rug was tangled in the mechanism. “You sucked this up and kept vacuuming?”
“I dunno how these damn things work. I been in the joint eleven years. Ain’t my fault.”
I freed the rug from the rollers, replaced the motor belt, and had Darryl plug it back in. I closed my eyes and smiled, relieved to hear the motor running normally. The last thing we needed was another repair bill. Another Chance’s budget was miniscule so even a minor expense was in reality major. If broken, I’d have to take my begging bowl to a church or community supporters to get a new one.
“Hey, you mind if I come talk to you when I’m done?”
“What about? Lyn is your case manager.”
“Yeah, but . . . she’s a woman. I can’t tell her.”
Sorrow in his gaze. That’s what hooked me even though I had more than enough on my plate as Emergency Shelter Coordinator, but looking into that man’s sad, pleading eyes had me willing to toss away my whole schedule. “Come on down when you’re ready.”
***
I closed and latched the top half of the staff office door for privacy. Darryl sat in the hardback chair next to my ancient metal desk, spiral notebook on his lap. I leaned back in my desk chair and considered him a moment: over six feet and skinny, with thinning blonde hair, a freckled, pale complexion, a huge bulbous nose, and a walrus mustache. But those eyes: dark blue with even darker swirls. Deep eyes filled with kindness and pain. “What do you need, Darryl?”
“Well, it’s kinda hard to say. See, I was in the joint a long time. When I got out, I was gonna move back home with my wife.”
“What’s her name?”
“Rose. Was Rose. Anyway, things changed when I’s in the joint.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t. See─” He shook his head. “I want to show you somethin’. He pulled out a sheet of notebook paper face down and slid it over. “Read that and lemme know what you think.”
“Oh, okay.” I turned the sheet over─Darryl grasped my wrist.
“Not now. Read it after I’m gone.” Darryl stood, walked out of the office, and closed the door.
I read:
As I sit here alone tonight, I think of you
And all the good times we shared
The moon light walks with roses in
Your hair I would pluck from a bush
As we passed by.
You remind me so much of Wild Roses
Growing on the mountain above town
For everyone knows it takes a special place
For a mountain rose to grow
A place filled with sunshine
Where the winter winds don’t blow
Home, was that special place
You were my sunshine
And warmed me in winter time
And kept the cold world out
You was my wild Mountain Rose!
***
I found Darryl drinking coffee in the dining and handed the poem back to him. “It’s nice, Darryl.”
“Thank you. You keep it. It’s in my head.”
“I take it this is about your wife?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you move back in with her?”
“She died. Cancer of the female parts.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You and me both.”
“Thanks for sharing this.”
Darryl nodded, anxious and sheepish. I returned to the office, glanced at the poem and slipped it reverently into my backpack.
***
A couple of days later Larry, the Overnight Coordinator at Another Chance, came in during the day. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“It’s about that Darryl guy.”
I sensed his reticence to continue. “And?”
“Early the other mornin’ I looked in the livin’ room before anybody else was up and . . .”
“And what?”
“He was fuckin’ the couch.”
“What?”
“His pants was down and he was fuckin’ the couch.”
“What?”
“Yeah, Mac, he was humpin’ the shit out of it. I went back in the office until, you know, he was done. I figured you oughta know.”
I closed my eyes and did my should-be-patented incredulous exhale. “Thanks, Larry. I’ll deal with it.”
But how?
***
I put off talking to Darryl about his erotic couch encounter hoping the incident would simply fade away.
It didn’t.
Larry caught him at again a week later.
Unable to avoid the issue, I called Darryl into the office one evening after he’d finished his chore for the night (the living room) and closed the door. “Am I in trouble?” Darryl squirmed with the usual trepidation of an ex-con.
“No,” I said, sitting down, and then, “Well, you might be. It’s just─” I took a breath.
“What’d I do?”
“I’ve gotten some eyewitness reports that you, uh, were having relations with the couch in the living room.”
“Oh, fuckin’ the couch?” Darryl didn’t bat an eye. “Yeah, I done that. So what? I used a rubber. I didn’t make no mess.”
I stammered.
“Better’n fuckin’ animals, ain’t it?”
I lacked a suitable response.
“Besides,” Darryl said, “I have my reasons. I’m not a weirdo.” He paused dramatically. “It’s the closest thing to my late wife I’ve ever found.”
“That couch?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She died while I was in the joint. After I was released I went crazy chasin’ puss, but none of them was Rose. One night I was all fucked-up on weed and Wild Turkey and, well, one thing led to another and I fucked my couch and it felt just like Rose! I mean, it was her! I never went back to a live woman again. Then I lost my job and my apartment and ended up here. I couldn’t afford no storage, so I lost that couch,”
“How did you happen to, uh, start loving our couch?”
“Watchin’ TV one night, my room key fell between the cushions. I dug around and, damn, it was as tight as Rose. After that I couldn’t sleep. I just had to get down here and knock off a piece. This couch is more Rose than the other one. When I’m doin’ it, I’m . . . with her. Understand?
Not really.
“I can see you have strong feelings, but you can’t fuck─make love—to that couch anymore Darryl, okay? I’ll have to kick you out of here and I don’t want to do that.”
Darryl nodded, looking sad. “I won’t.” He stood. As he opened the office door, he said, “I sure do miss her.”
***
Darryl was true to his word; there were no more reports of couch lovemaking. Although the left corner of the couch became his spot to sit during TV time; he guarded it like a mother bear a cub. He found a job at a metal recycling yard and within two months had saved enough for first month rent and deposit on a small apartment four blocks from Another Chance.
I was able to find him a donated TV, easy chair, coffee table, and a small dining table with two rickety chairs. During that time, a local minister from a supportive Methodist church called about wanting to donate a couch.
The proverbial light bulb clicked in my brain. When the church people delivered the donated couch, I had them switch it with the old couch─the Rose couch─and load it in their pickup.
Darryl came to the door of his new house. I smiled and said, “Got something for you.”
Darryl gasped as the church volunteers carried the Rose couch inside and placed it against the wall opposite his TV. I explained the story of the couch donated to Another Chance and how I thought it appropriate Darryl have the old one (without the volunteers knowing the true reason).
Darryl hugged me so hard the vertebrae between my shoulder blades audibly cracked.
I went to Pogue’s Tavern for a sandwich and a couple of beers that evening. But as it often did, a couple turned into too many. Pogue locked the door at midnight and as he cleaned up, he slipped me a few shots of Jameson from under the bar.
With that much lubrication, my lips grew loose. “Hey, Pogue, what would you say if a guy missed his dead wife so much, he’d have sex with a couch to recreate her memory?”
Blankly, Pogue said, “I should’a cut you off an hour ago.”
“No, I’m serious. If a guy was so in love that the only way he could find a hint of her in the here and now was to screw a couch, what would you say?”
“I’d say that poor bastard needs new pussy bad!”
Pogue couldn’t grasp the higher meaning; could not wrap his head around a man who’d found a way to reconnect beyond the grave with his beloved wife. As for me, jaded as I was after my failed marriage, I found it inspiring that this poor ex-inmate’s love was so strong he’d do anything to keep her memory alive.
Any thing. And if sex is truly just in the brain as the scientists claim, what did it matter in the end how one achieved erotic transcendence?
In my apartment later, I cracked open a Shiner Bock I did not need and plopped on the couch. Before passing out, I raised my bottle in the air to the most faithful man I have ever known.
I woke up at two o’clock, TV blaring, and got up to go to bed. The TV remote was sandwiched between my couch cushions. I pulled it out, noticing how snug the fit was and─
Oh, don’t even go there!
________________________________________________________________________
HOW TO OPERATE WITH A BLOWN MIND
By Judith Roney
Work, work, work mantra-every-morning sunrise. Say write like a mother
but you left your kid when he was hurting most, when his eyes-like-yours
welled-up like two featherless chicks cracked too early from the shell
in the house on the five acres where the boy’s father was so good
at mowing but not much else. We won’t talk about the tiny pink fabric
flower in the glass tube, or the cracked-on-one-end fabric bloomed pipe
that cut your lip and had you singing I’m a witch, and soothsaying,
some kind of chick, some anyone. So you move away from everything
you thought was good, or evil, drove yourself mad, drove to the South 65
entrance ramp with two big dogs, ten day-old puppies and the kind of shit
you grab when you clear out a house and going back isn’t an option. Don’t stop
in Kentucky Tennessee or Georgia. Get to Florida where it’s not all sunshine
but more like the bottom of a bag of chips, where all the crumbs sift
to the bottom and you hope no one finds you, and you drink beer
like a mackerel loves running until you find something in the scrub
under the slash pine that looks something like you. Something like you.
NON-FICTION
_____________________________________________________________
Mom’s Creamy Coconut Cake Recipe
By Laura Kendall
Over dinner the night before your mom’s birthday she will tell you she bought ingredients for coconut cake, but she’d rather you help her sort things at her deceased brother’s house. Listen to her wistful tone; watch her eyes fall toward her plate. Realize she was planning to bake her own cake. Know she has already sacrificed too much.
Suggest your father bake the cake. Watch him look up from his left-over pizza in surprise, or terror, as he chews a bite of crust too long. Set the temperature of your face to challenge him. Listen as he begrudgingly agrees, as he warns he cannot bake with anyone else around. You’ve never seen your father bake anything; chuckle at the very idea.
Rise the next morning after your mother has left. Interrupt your father’s Google searches to remind him about the cake. “Your mother didn’t leave a recipe” he will say, as though it’s a viable excuse. Sigh audibly and Google “coconut cake.” Find the recipe he is least likely to mess up. Creamy Coconut Cake: just five ingredients. Cross your fingers.
Feign interest (you are always doing this, though it’s not reciprocated) as your father talks. He’s never mentioned it before, but he claims to have dyspraxia, a disorder that affects spatial awareness. This is not the first disorder he’s claimed for himself. “Normal people can stir without looking,” he says, “but if I look away from the bowl, I could be stirring the air for all I know.” Tell him he’s simply clumsy, but yield when he gets argumentative. Don’t let him see you stifle a laugh. Remember your mother is alone at her dead brother’s house.
Head to the kitchen for the dry ingredients. Pull a box of white cake mix from the cupboard above the breadbox and a can of sweetened condensed milk from the cabinet under the microwave. Unbury a bag of coconut from the extra refrigerator. Place the ingredients next to the coconut milk already on the counter. Look for Cool Whip. When you cannot find any, move the carton of whipping cream to the front of the refrigerator.
Check the recipe again. Pull out a 9x13 pan and place it on the counter. Your father will need a straw to poke holes in the cake. Rifle through drawers until you find a neon blue bendy straw. Lay it next to the pan.
As you leave the house, remind your father to start baking—that he will need to preheat the oven—that the cake will need to cool in the refrigerator. Doubt he will do this.
Help your mother sort blankets and towels in your uncle’s linen closet. Rifle through boxes of old comic books, finding copies so old their asking price is just ten cents; watch your mother’s eyes widen with excitement. Smile with her. When your mother’s phone rings hours later listen to her end of the conversation. “Use a beater and a cold bowl—put it in the freezer for a few minutes if you have to.” Wonder why your father is just now whipping the cream. Wonder how your mother’s patience hasn’t dissolved.
As afternoon reaches toward evening, return to your parents’ house. When you get there, watch amazed as your father pulls the pan out of the old refrigerator and places it in front of your mother. Dig the number-shaped candles into the cream, making small furrows in the snow. As is your family tradition, sing the Happy Birthday Song—all three verses. Your mother will not stand for skipped verses. Then clap your hands and sing “Sto Lat,” the traditional Polish song that holds your mother’s breath in her mouth until its final line, “Niech żyje nam!”
Watch your mother blow out the candles—wicks nearly drowned. Watch her cut the cake, passing snow-white squares across her vinyl table cloth before placing one small paper plate in front of her. Your father has already started eating, so remind him he was supposed to wait. Watch him stare into his cake, still chewing, while the fork hits your mother’s mouth and her eyes close in contentment. Take the first creamy-sweet bite of your own cake. Feel guilty that there are no presents, but tell yourself she doesn’t care. Convince yourself the time you spent sorting was enough. Smile, because despite everything, she is happy; wish you could be pleased in such small ways.
POETRY
_________________________________________________
Feeble
by A.S. Coomer
“For it is important that awake people be awake...”
-William Stafford from A Ritual to Read Each Other
We are all capable
of sweeping beauty
& inescapable rage.
We, floating freely
like early summer
thunderheads, suspended
like dust and ash
after the blast,
move in patterns,
the fog clung close
to moving water still
warm from yesterday’s sun,
heads bowed, eyes closed,
hearts on mute,
mind stuck in another season,
until motion,
a jarring jerk,
a shove or flounce,
brings us back into the present,
into the now
---Dao shrouded & resplendent
in complimenting dichotomies--
and we open our feeble eyes.
__________________________________________
SE 14th Avenue Evenings
-for Viva
by Brianne Manning
Our seventeen-year-old phantoms remember the nights
your eyes turned to razorblades that sliced
moral blemishes into our hides and butchered
innocence we believed you capable of while siphoning
Four Loko into your jaded veins.
Your mother kept a leather-bound collection
of her religious machinations,
and you stole it to read to us late at night
as you danced in the velvet of the underground
and to Nico's hollow voice.
You asked if you were beautiful.
What did we learn from prying?
From your birth, your mother wanted
you to be her little girl. Your family sat
in practiced silence as you struggled
with who you were and who She raised
you to be—a boy without
a boy's or girl's soul. Maybe
no absolute soul at all.
But we still remember the nights
you were beautiful.
______________________________________________
Paucity of Thought and the Consciousness of Lower Species
By Leonie Mikele
Kneel. Shut your eyes. What’s lost
bounces back. Thickens to a rock.
If you’re lucky
if you think
you’re human. Silicon-oxygen
in tetrahedra--
a church laid out in space, for instance--
quartz out of so much paper. Bet a blue jay brain
it’s simple. Design.
The engineers of real
malign
the half-remembered, third-recalled,
not-yet-postulated, dismember
what ricochets out of time….
Stick to steps and line.
But to real-ize is to abstract a sum
from disparate wings—
a feather here, claw, air sacs, beak.
When it veers above you—not hard.
But difficult. Thought. Ethereal
as a Lyceum of Flight for birds is—
liquid as pouring concrete
is, boxing with administrators,
is, making numbers meet is.
It’s a bird bath.
Viscous thought.
Even if all you’ve got’s
one graphite stub, one T-square nicked on all edges,
a degree in landings where tough and disenfranchised
are the names of the tempo we live in—
even.
Here, in glory of all its parts
is: lungs, air sacs, bones of
laces, pin feathers, mandibles,
crops, culverts, claws,
flights…
miasmas of brain--stores, counts,
seeds in places, scoring
oratorios, programs
of parts, reckoning air
in inches, feathers
locked
from branch
to branch.
To make it to human—
you have to win some race. The prize
is to measure
girth and weight. A brain. Then. Fathom
a yard--
its yews, graves. Skeletons
of timbers, mortar tucked, cairns of stones.
Metal. Poured, cooled, beaten, dragged,
steadied, hoisted, hinged,
flown apart.
Emptiness.
For thieves.
The sting. The fever. The flood-ness of.
Light.
For pity. The robbers.
Skins. Eyes. Poor.
Absent wings.
Re-see a symbol, brain. See it.
It speaks barrier, brain.
Recall re-call as an act.
Frontier, perimeter, limit, stop. Knowing, knowing, periphery, stop.
Do you recall
it was glass.
____________________________________________
Your Nissan Stanza
By Meghan Kemp-Gee
Ten. I am lately tired of claiming that
the world won’t hold together. I lately
have had enough of suspicion of
artifice and forged connections. I am
lately tired, and it is late, and you are
tired and you are falling asleep. Four oh
five. I will drive and you will lean your head
on the window and it puts you to sleep. One oh
five. I dedicate this sundown to my
predecessors in the carpool lane, who
ease me down to thirty with cascades of
brakelights signing that they’re all already
doing what I’m about to do. I will
complete the choreography, I will
drive while you sleep. Six oh five. I dedicate
the fire over Santa Clarita to our
passing on the left, to the checking of our
rearview mirrors, our most benevolent
yielding to out-of-state licence plates
on an obfuscated onramp. Ninety-
one. To the never-dark night sky I
dedicate the way that at least on
the San Diego Freeway one is not,
can never be, completely all alone.
Fifty-seven. To the one last workman
standing still beside a floodlit open
excavation site, I dedicate the
possibility that he rhymes. We offer
him a decreased speed ordered by orange
signs and so the world is changed around him:
we move differently. This is to say, your
car, my care, this is all yours as you are
mine to transport. I offer movement through
named channels, arteries and metaphors.
Twenty-two. I offer the moment when
after we merge the GPS doesn’t
know where it is yet. Five. I offer you
Los Angeles, which is so hard to end
in any direction. I promise that
someday we’ll move home somewhere with lower
rent and universal healthcare. Ten. I
promise that wherever that home is will
always rhyme with here. Four oh five. And here,
I promise you that we are so, so small.
I offer you that. I promise myself
that we live here to prove this to ourselves,
to be counted and skipped over in these
self-melting numbers, that we must live here
so that we never get proud. One oh one.
I want to go back to those forged connections
across artificial structures. I want
you to see what I’m doing for you. Don’t
wake up, just sleep and watch me drive. Sleep and
see how it’s too late to make another
way for me to be. One. Lend me your car.
_____________________________________________
Something
By Nicole Byrne
“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
—Pancho Villa, last words.
Tell them I said dying is
exactly like learning to
swim, but nothing like
learning to walk.
Tell them I said there's
more to the spectrum of
sight than what's revealed
in the refraction of light.
Tell them I said the last
breath tastes like jasmine,
like cardamom, like rose hips,
like the smoke of blue lotus.
Tell them I said dying is
like climbing a tree for
the first time: a smother
of vertigo and cedar sap.
Tell them I said my heart
danced the samba, jive
and cha-cha-cha until I
realized I had never felt so
Julianne
By Nicole Byrne
Julianne was born without
a larynx. Void of voice,
all she knew stayed inside
her. At sixteen, she hid
from summer heat
in her parents’ cellar, dusted
off their record player.
She tasted Leonard Cohen
and he taught her
how to cry, which taught
her lips how to move.
Something hot inside her
beat to be released,
to unground her, but she
had no sound to express
the bellbird she felt fluttering
in her chest. She learned
to climb trees to feel at one
with the sky, and kiss
trees instead of screaming. Soon,
her mouth was always full
of sap. Her lips grew shells
of crystalline sugar and
her tongue learned to roll
syrup around her gums.
After a year of kisses,
her teeth rotted and fell out.
Mistletoe bloomed from
where they planted themselves
in the branches. She swallowed
green drupes until her veins
relaxed. When she fell
from the tree, she never hit
the ground. She became wind
and rain and was spread
throughout the sky in thrush
songs. She whispers in sun
showers and howls in hurricanes,
and let herself vibrate
with the rhythms she could
never speak.
___________________________________________
Love Song of the Stingray
By Tamara Miles
(borrowing from Alice Walker the phrase Temple of My Familiar)
I dwell in an aquarium, quite comfortable,
cushioned sounds of the temple of my familiar,
cared for, not unhappy.
I go my cycled path around the tank,
have almost forgotten the waters
of my ancestors.
You come to visit, stand at the glass
to admire a mysterious creature,
spend a lunch hour here, study me,
sketch, admire my supple movements,
my curious aspects,
at a safe distance.
I delight in your attention.
I wish you into the water to play,
but it is far too dangerous.
You might meet, in these waters,
the hour of your destruction, a drowning,
a stab through the heart.
Two creatures, then, on each side
of the wall, appointed to live separately,
appointed to meet and meet again,
and never to touch,
but I have need of you and you of me.
I will look for you in the crowd
with your camera-lens eyes, pen
and patient curiosity, a god to one
like me, forbidden.
I pray you go mad and break the glass.
__________________________________________
undress
By Zoe Bodzas
it's pronounced zipper
i wanna be halved
& had by two tenses
at once, duel lingo
shuttle styx
then slip downtown
it’s pronounced ripper
around the middle
pawed apart
w/ two prong tongs
general anesthesia
to be alive
& dead
at the same time
diptych w/ buttons
& holes o
holy severing
of cloth and pore
have you ever
seen a woman
spill into night
& combust at dawn
a caul of tulle
doused in doom
so caesarean
watch me i mother
myself.
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