Spring 2016 | Illumination: The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities by Illumination: the Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

illumination The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

Mission

The mission of Illumination is to provide the undergraduate student body of the University of Wisconsin-Madison a chance to publish work in the fields of humanities and to display some of the school’s best talent. As an approachable portal for creative writing, art, and scholarly essays, the diverse content in the journal will be a valuable addition to the intellectual community of the university and all of the people it affects.

COVER ART • “STRANGE DESIRES” by Selia Salzsieder

illumination editor in chief layout

Emmett Mottl Theda Berry

essay

Shannon Murphy

prose

Cole Meyer

poetry art marketing

Sukanya Sathiamoorthi Skye Cooper Madison Schiller

WUD Publications Director WUD Publications Advisor

l l

Rachel Wanat Jim Rogers

Digital Staff digital editors

Reid Kurkerewicz Madelyn Sundquist

video editor

Raegan Niemela

Wisconsin idea

James Holden

assist. Wisconsin idea editor

Micah Roberts

staff writers

Chandler Adams Lauren Boritzke Irene Burski August Glomski Lauren Gonitzke Hannah Mumm Colten Parr Laura Schmitt Abby Sherman

SPECIAL THANKS Illumination would like to extend a special thank you to Former Chancellor John D. Wiley and to the Lemuel R. and Norma B. Boulware estate for setting up the Boulware fund, which funds Illumination every semester.

Letter from the editor

llumination was created by students who understood the power of undergraduate creative work and the opportunity it provides students in influencing others. Just this year, art has sparked conversations on race and gender equality while hateful messages appeared on campus—both existing at the same time and highlighting how crucial it is to listen to the voices fighting against oppression. The promise of giving everyone a voice is a crucial responsibility not only of the University of Wisconsin administration, but something that every member of the campus community should work hard for. All of us have a responsibility in making our campus and the world at large dedicated to, and an active promoter of, equality and respect. We believe that the Wisconsin Idea, the promise made long ago to the residents and guests of our state, compels us to use our knowledge and skills to make decisive improvements to the world. I had the chance to meet with many of our contributors this semester and talk with them about their creative process and their experiences as members of the campus community. The predominate theme for nearly all of the conversations was the importance of surrounding yourself with positive people that provide support, and when necessary, laugh at your overly clichéd metaphors. One of the most important things that I have learned on this campus is the impact that a strong, warm, and supportive community can have on an individual. I am thankful every day that there are incredible people in my life who motivate me to grow as an individual and encourage me to use a voice (Faux-British in diction) that I didn’t know I had. To all the friends and mentors that have encouraged an uncertain, self-conscious undergraduate—thank you. Many wonderful people made our success this year possible and helped us create our most beautiful journal yet. And, perhaps most impressively, the pieces come from a wide range of backgrounds, majors, and interests. We received our most submissions and produced our largest publication to date, and it is my hope that this promises even greater things to come next year. Thank you for making all of this possible. This publication contains just a few of the incredible voices on campus, and it is the hope of this organization that you share your own immense talent with the world. Be bold. Best wishes,

Emmett Mottl

Letter from the director

am so, so pleased to present the Spring 2016 issue of Illumination. This has been such a productive year for the Illumination staff, and I am thrilled to see the culmination of so many months’ work. This issue really is a treat, and I am so proud of all the hours that went into producing this well-crafted journal. Beyond the efforts of the Illumination staff, I would also like to extend a special thanks to all those undergraduate students who submitted their work for publication this year. Illumination works because of these very talented students. It takes a great deal of courage to put forth one’s work for submission, and I am extremely grateful for any student that took the time to share their work with us. The humanities scene at UW-Madison is alive and well, and I believe this journal shows just that. Much, much thanks to the Illumination Editor-in-Chief Emmett Mottl. This year, Emmett has taken Illumination to a brand new level. In developing a strong digital presence for Illumination, Emmett has ensured that the spirit of the humanities is thriving in between publication of regular print issues. Thanks in this direction is also extended to Madelyn Sundquist and Reid Kurkerewicz. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you all to check out www.uwilluminationjournal.com, as well as Illumination Journal’s Facebook page. On the website, you will find not only the inspiring work from student submissions, but also the talented videography of Raegan Niemela. Raegan is an integral part of the Illumination staff, and her work filming at Lit After Dark is a treat. Additionally, Raegan has been instrumental in getting the multimedia aspects of Illumination going this year. Her expertise in the field is second to none, and if you need more proof, just go check out the first installment of Live from the Lake, a multimedia project where local artists perform stripped-down sets in the Wisconsin Union Directorate office. Another thanks to Theda Berry, who single-handedly has designed this beautiful journal for the second time this year. Theda has lifted the design of Illumination to a whole new standard, crafting the two largest issues in Illumination history. Her exquisite attention to detail shows in the pages of this journal, and it is pleasure to see the beautiful work of students transformed into such a presentation. Thanking him once just wouldn’t be enough—so thank you again to Emmett Mottl. My esteemed colleague, my spirited advocate, my trusted friend. Emmett has worked tirelessly this year, and the entire UW-Madison campus is indebted to his outstanding efforts in the field of the humanities. Happy reading!

Rachel Wanat

Selia Salzsieder Strange Desires (Series) Paper Collage

TABLE OF

FEATURED ARTISTS

CONTENTS 5, 80 8 11, 45, 79, 84 12 13 14-15 17, 23,24 19 20 27 28 30 33 35 36 39 40 42 49 51 52 57, 60 63 64, 67, 68 72 75 76 83 86

STRANGE DESIRES (SERIES) • Selia Salzsieder FORBIDDEN PLEASURES • William Doty UNTITLED • Betsy Osterberger A CREASED COMFORT • Ariel Wood FALSE SUPPORT • Ariel Wood THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE (SERIES) • Maggie Beheler-Amass UNTITLED • Lindi Shi WHITE LAKE • Sara Warden DOUBLE RAINBOW, SUMMER 2015 • Caleb Weisnicht THE FIFTIES • Hillary Kuhlemeier SHATTERED • Maggie Beheler-Amass DETAILS • Maggie Beheler-Amass STILL LYFE WIT ALIENZ!!! • William Doty FLOCK • Caleb Weisnicht COME TO YOUR SENSES • Lana Scholtz OLD GROWTH • Caleb Weisnicht CARESS US WITH SERENDIPITY • Maggie Beheler-Amass EL BARRIO • Yeline Del Carmen BETA CUCK • William Doty GEOLOGY STUDY • Kimberly Watanabe UP IN SMOKE • Genevieve Anderegg UNTITLED • Kimberly Watanabe WEATHERED • Maggie Beheler-Amass MAY (SERIES) • Thomas Yonash TOUT EST ILLUMINÉ • Maggie Beheler-Amass BEING SEXY • William Doty PUSH YOU AWAY • Brittany Fahres DON’T GO • Betsy Osterberger GENERATION X • Lana Scholtz

ESSAY

32 44

HOW TO HANDLE OFFICE LUNCH • Jon Shapiro FOOD FOR KIDS • Mia Shehadi

PROSE

9 22 26 62 78 87

HOW TO PLAY THE FIELD • Cedar Fox THE BEAUTIFUL CANNIBALS • Charlotte Kazlauskas FREE COVER LETTER TEMPLATE • Caleb Weisnicht RAYMOND ROAD • Zoe Townsend THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE DAY • Emma Wathen SOME MEANS TO AN END • Alex Van Buskirk

POETRY

12 16 18 21 28 29 31 34 37 38 41 43 46 48 50 53 54 55 56 58 61 71 73 74 76

INSOMNIACS TRY TO FALL ASLEEP • Nora Herzog 5TH YEAR AT THE ACADEMY • Cody Fearing BELOW THE SURFACE • Claire MacDonald CATCH • Justine Jones BY KARA WALKER • Rebecca Rieder WHEN I AM • Matthew Stokdyk MEMORY OF A MAN ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON • Isaac Ama JAMES IS GONE • Spencer McAfee Gundrum HEARTBEAT IN THE FINGERTIPS • Molly Wallace JAWBREAKER • Cody Dunn MENDOTA WITHSTANDING • Alexandra Pleasant FOR MY SISTER • Shine Peter CHAMELEON CORPSE • Francisco Velazquez TRIPLE A • John McCracken IMPACT JOINTS • Louise Lyall TWO STEPPING • Nailah Frye NO RED TENT PARTY • Krista Brown NEW WOMAN • Kiyoko Reidy DIG AND SAVE • Dillon Burch HA’EMET OR THE TRUTH I LEARNED FROM YOU IN GOOD FAITH• Eva Jacobs YOU • Ella Rausch SCHIZOPHRENIA • Majah Carberry SANDBAR • Majah Carberry CHAOS THEORY • Alexandra Pleasant IF I HAD A HOUSE AND YOU LIVED IN IT • Cedar Fox

William Doty Forbidden Pleasures Ink, Watercolor, Ink Jet Print on Bristol

HOW TO PLAY THE FIELD BY CEDAR FOX

alk into a bar. See a man with Gisele Bündchen-like hair and think, “What an interesting man.” Start a conversation with him. Tell him about your current boyfriend of eight months and how certain you are that he is the one. Watch the longhaired man scoff in a cool sort of way and tell you he does not believe in monogamy. Listen to him tell you that he doesn’t think love should be limited in a relationship. He says that he can love more than one person at once, and it doesn’t diminish the love he feels for each woman. He says it’s called polyamory. Find it to be the most radical and wonderful idea you’ve ever heard. Go to your pastor that weekend and say you are in love with a man from the city who does not believe in monogamy. He will tell you that the man is bound to be selfish. Do not believe you pastor. Break up with your boyfriend. On Friday afternoon, walk into a Victoria’s Secret. Buy one of those “Bombshell Adds-2-Cups” push-up bras and a satin lace thong to match. Before you check out, spend five nervous minutes mulling over a pair of black crotchless panties until a thin, dark haired sales associate walks by and asks you if you’re finding everything you need. Drop the crotchless panties on the floor, leave them there, and mutter something about having too many crotchless panties at home already. Next, drive to Walgreens. Spend ten minutes reading the back of the Nair box and Sally Hansen Cold Wax Strip box. Decide waxing sounds sexier. Go home. Lock yourself in your bathroom. Begin the painful process before you lose your nerve. Rip the first strip and let out a scream. It’s the kind of one-second highpitched screech that leaves your face pulsing red with embarrassment, even though no one is around to hear you. Scrutinize the wax strip and the forest of pubic

ASK ALL OF YOUR PARTNERS WHAT THEY THINK LOVE MEANS. THEY ALL TELL YOU DIFFERENT THINGS. curls stuck to the yellow-beige goo and decide you must finish the job. Wax all but the most sensitive areas. Examine the finished product with a hand mirror. Realize you like your vagina and are excited to show it off. Return to the bar with the longhaired man. Talk about the time in high school when your Aunt Gene got cancer and died, because it makes you sound more dynamic. The longhaired man listens intently and asks you if you want to go somewhere more private to talk. Say yes. The longhaired man takes you to an apartment with base walls. He explains that he wants to be able to pack up his things in less than hour and move on, because he lives an unpredictable life. When he is done talking your thong is wet and sticking to your hairless crotch. He makes love to you for an hour and half. When you are exhausted and think that it is over you lie in disbelief that sex could ever take that long. Then he turns to you and asks, “Done already?” Lie and say, “No, I just have to use the bathroom.” Go into the bathroom for 15 minutes and catch your breath. Worry that you’ll never be able to keep up with the longhaired man’s needs and that he’s disappointed in the sex thus far. Decide you are ready to go home. Walk out of the bathroom. He tells you that you are beautiful. Feel a wave a heat rush over your chest and face. Let him fuck you for another 35 minutes. Two weeks later you have seen and made love to the longhaired man almost every day. He tells you he can’t only sleep with you. You cry, even though you knew this was coming. He tells you to try it out. He

explains he does not like you less when he is with someone else; he just likes them as well. Don’t believe him. Get really depressed for three days. Notice a man with a manbun and scruffy beard at H&M and decide it is time to try the longhaired man’s theory. Flirt with him and wait around for his shift to end. Ask him to get a drink. Let him take you home. Manbun man is good in bed. Wonder why you listened to your pastor your whole life. Get a new apartment in the city center. Start wearing combat boots and saying things like, “I want to get my septum pierced.” Your friends are confused. Only one is supportive. Start having sex with him. Wonder if his desire to fuck you is the only reason he is supportive. Ask all of your partners what they think love means. They all tell you different things. Decide women know best. Go to Urban Outfitters for more delicate bras and panties. Start wearing less make up. Wear a rainbow bracelet. Go to a dimly lit bar. Sit alone at the bar and order a Tanqueray and tonic. Make eyes at the redhead across the bar. Look away like you don’t notice her moving down the bar towards you. Let the redheaded woman hit on you. Make out with the redheaded woman in a bathroom stall. Realize you’re not ready for a face full of pussy, leave, and call the longhaired man. The longhaired man won’t answer because he’s fucking another girl right now. You try manbun man, but he works the night shift as a custodian for the Country Inn & Suites. Turn around and go back into the bar. See the redheaded woman get-

ting hit on by a man with a handlebar mustache. You and your combat boots are no match for a mustache like that. Go home alone. Call your ex-boyfriend, the one you had monogamous missionary sex with for the last two months of your relationship. Hear him say he misses you. Tell him you miss him, too. Tell him about your multiple partners. Hear the words come from your mouth. Question your life choices. Debate becoming a nun. Remind yourself not to overcorrect life choices. Go to Walgreens hell bent on buying cigarettes. Buy a Swisher Sweet instead, because you want to smoke but don’t want to be a smoker. Grow out your armpit hair. Tell your boyfriends it makes you feel French. Your one supportive friendturned-fuck-buddy tells you you’re losing your mind. Tell him you don’t think his main focus is your mind. He leaves your apartment that night and doesn’t come back. Replace him with a man you meet who bounces at a chain bar down the street. It is the type of bar that has exclusively girls in short shorts and tank tops serving the food. The bouncer offers you a Newport Menthol and tells you about the underground boxing ring he fights at. He tells you how strong the boxing makes his arms, his hands. Fuck the bouncer. Decide it was a mistake. He has a face tattoo, for Christ’s sake. That’s too scary for you. Worry you are losing your edge because a face tattoo scares you. Remind yourself how edgy longhaired man and manbun man are. Feel cool again. In the morning go to the hippest coffee shop

in town and pretend to be writing fascinating things in a chestnut-brown leather notebook embossed with a lotus design on the front cover. Look up thoughtfully over your double, extra dry cappuccino and notice a man in his 40s picking up a black coffee at the end of the bar. Decide that’s your next goal: a rich 40-something. That night, put on a simple, reserved, but sexy dress. Wear your dark plum lipstick and rings on almost every finger. It shows you are edgy but still refined. Go to the swankiest downtown bar and order a gin gimlet. It’s an unexpected yet classy drink. Wait. Two men take the bait. One has stubble that makes him look like he’s trying to balance the same amount of edge and class as you are. The other one is clean-shaven, wearing a navy suit, and has salt and pepper hair. Go for him. He is the biggest departure from your mundane badass boys.

Wake up in his penthouse the next morning. The pictures in the hallway reveal he has a family. His daughters look to be your age. Your throat closes. Yes, you questioned yourself when you fucked the bouncer, but who wouldn’t? The face tattoo? That’s an obvious mistake, but this is even more damaging. Leave. Now. Your walk home is the most obvious walk of shame you’ve ever had. You’re carrying your stupid fuck-me pumps and you can almost feel the humiliation seeping from your flesh alerting everyone on the street that you had quite the night. Take the two flights of stairs up to the one-room walk-up apartment you rarely ever sleep in. Binge watch two seasons of Gossip Girl trying to convince yourself that your life is actually pretty tame compared to those people. Realize you are lying to yourself again. Gossip Girl is not based on a true story, you self-pitying

girl. Shove your laptop off your lap in frustration. You shove it too hard and it falls off your bed and crashes down upon the sterile white tile that plagues your entire apartment. Pick it up. The screen is shattered. Scream and cry, but mostly cry. It’s an ugly, open mouth cry. Catch you reflection in the mirror. Good god, you look like a fucking mess. Who are you? What do you want from life? Clichés flash through your thoughts and you feel even more stupid. Your phone rings. It’s your friend-turned-fuck-buddyturned-ex-friend/fuck buddy. He’s just calling to say hi. “I miss you,” he says. He hears the sobs in your responses. He says he’s coming over. He arrives with a pizza and a bottle of wine. You talk all night, and he just listens. He hands you slices of pizza and fills your glass when it runs dry. You do not fuck. He does not stay the night. l

Betsy Osterberger Untitled Photography

INSOMNIACS TRY TO FALL ASLEEP BY NORA HERZOG

When the sensation of sleep fails, The first thing to go is the eyelids, then the cheekbones, the jaw, The fingertips, the toes, The longer limbs, the torso, And finally; the elbows and temple. The last two stay to remind of discomfortâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; The elbows twinge rustily, remembering what it feels like to hit them, Scraping like echoes of rocks thrown in a dark tunnel. The temples are something different, They throb and beat, like drums, Trying to dance the brain awake awake awake

Ariel Wood A Creased Comfort (left), False Support (right) Flashe paint and dye on wood panel

So that it can see what it looks like to feel invisible So it can understand how all things are only an extension of its awareness, How all things can come together, Converging on a single moment, spinning and spinning and spinning, Like a crooked spinning top that will not fall, The edges of perception ring inside the parameters of the skull, And all moments come together, Suddenly, Like the dip of a roller coaster You are gone and lost inside the beauty of existence The kind of beauty that hurts too much to bear, The kind of beauty that death uses to mask its sadness That sacrifice uses to hide its tragedy The kind that inadvertently brings tears to the eyes that cannot close, That will not close because this existence hurts too much to stay, But far too much to let go and risk losing the sight of perfection that the eyes can glimpse In the small moments between pain and nonexistence.

THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE BY MAGGIE BEHELER-AMASS

BY CODY FEARING

5TH YEAR AT THE ACADEMY

read: coherence almost only about eight inches between noose and halo the belligerent conscience who whispered murder

drunk off fantasy and flight revisions on the sharp table

its fire waxed glass weighted by syllabus or rough-drafted suicide note

“I villain”

“I almost”

“I leaving”

but gods are help cries too close and no comfort those messenger doves nesting down the hallway carrying me towards the entrance curb my roommate’s car the makeshift gurney and white bracelets I can taste like drowsy tic tac noise or benzos

ripped off before triage replaced again by intake while I

every hair of this involuntary beard blossoming stale just in time for

only four weeks until the deep sleep

for now wrists as smiles and

dry shower curtains

again the occupational therapist helped me write a certificate of birth

count the notches in the belt or the white bracelet

and showed me every radiant stain

Lindi Shi Untitled Woodcut, lithography

BELOW THE

SURFACE BY CLAIR MACDONALD I stood at the edge of the water and watched myself die. It all sunk to the ďŹ&#x201A;oor below all of the water collapsed under pressure a strange tranquility bloomed as life freed me. But the light still shone through the water and reďŹ&#x201A;ected everywhere in places I had never noticed so I took my breath. it lifted me to the surface where I saw my pale face and wild red hair and yearning collarbones so I stepped back and exhaled the entire ocean.

Sara Warden White Lake Photography

Caleb Weisnicht Double Rainbow, Summer 2015 Acrylic on book page

CATCH BY JUSTINE JONES galoshes transcend the edge of the wooden table and he wrangles his food like worms, hook & kill. she sees his head dry as sand, rubber shoulders bald shores of the continent. thinks one day i will thrash from the darkness between you & me and emerge. i will breathe the miles of bay water spun between your hands, the miles, miles where the sun breathes also.

THE BEAUTIFUL CANNIBALS I

wake with a start, naked and cold, on a Saturday. Heat usually emanates from my crooked radiator, but it’s silent now, and further out, in the hallway and down the stairs, it’s quiet, too. There is an unfamiliarity about my body when I begin to move. A new center of gravity, perhaps, or a precursor to vomiting? Nay, I discover when I go to rub my eyes: my skin is gone. My hands touch my bare eyeballs instead of eyelids. When I shift in bed, I feel smaller, or that my hands don’t weigh as much as they once did. Underneath the covers are swaths of muscles snaking their way around my legs, and a pair of my girlfriend’s underwear. This is when I realize that my slippery body is alone. My girlfriend, along with all of my skin, has disappeared. Our kitchen is in ruins. Beer cans and bottles cover most surfaces, and, as I soon discover, are suctioned into place by a crystalized layer of Sprite and liqueur. A roommate of mine is examining a

disembodied door on the floor. He jumps when he sees me. “What the fuck?” he says, peering into my face. “What happened to you? You look freaky without eyelids. Who knew that the eyeball was that enormous?” “Me,” I say. “I learned it in second grade. Have you seen Jessica?” He scoffs. “I don’t pay attention to ladies under an eight, no offense. Did Britta leave last night?” I shrug. “Goddammit, that ass. I could have sworn that we were headed to the bedroom.” Together we use the bottoms of liquor bottles to hammer the door hinges back into place, but when we step away, it’s terribly crooked, and backwards. “I gotta get out of here, man,” I tell my friend. “Let me know if you see Jess.” “Bro, I won’t, I told you that already,” he says, and I leave him rubbing lube onto the hinges of the motionless door. Another one of my roommates is asleep in his bed, mouth agape, with one hand clutching his cell phone

and the other tangled in the hair of the little sleeping female next to him. “Hi, guys,” I say, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. The girl stirs. “Good morning. Jake! Hi! Wake up!” I prod his stomach. The girl opens a bleary eye. “Hi,” she says. “Who are you?” I ask. “What,” groans Jake. He lifts his head. “Oh, this is, um, Reva.” “It’s Rebekah,” she says. She giggles. “You look weirder than I thought.” Rebekah suddenly whips out of bed, clothed already in her dress from the night before, and flies down the stairs, calling, “See you later!” as she went. “What?” I yell after her. “What?” I say again, this time to Jake, who is not listening because he has just noticed that I have no skin. “My god!” he says, and prods one of my naked arms. “Crazy! Craziest shit ever! Do you think you could get onto TV? I think you could, but only if you do something about the eyes. No eyelids do not look good on you, dude.” “That’s what everyone keeps say-

AFTER A FEW HOURS OF SEARCHING MY ROOM AND THE WRECKAGE OF THE REST OF THE HOUSE, I DISCOVER THAT MY CELL PHONE IS NOWHERE, MY SKIN IS NOWHERE, AND NEITHER IS MY GIRLFRIEND. 22

BY CHARLOTTE KAZLAUSKAS

ing,” I reply. “Do you know if Jess left last night?” He laughs. “Does it look like I’ve kept track of your girlfriend? Does it look like I’ve kept track of anything? The only reason I ended up sleeping with Rose was because I thought she was Caitlin. You know, the ten? The bunny from Halloween?” I say, totally, even though my mind is far away, searching last night’s blank spots for Jessica’s droopy, strange face. Then I do remember Caitlin, the bunny from Halloween. “It was her nipples,” I say. “Perky, all night.” After a few hours of searching my room and the wreckage of the rest of the house, I discover that my cell phone is nowhere, my skin is nowhere, and neither is my girlfriend. The only useful item that I find is my bathrobe, which is soft, even on my tender muscles. It helps to cut the wind outside. Jessica’s house is two blocks away. When I knock, a tiny girl opens the door. She scowls when she sees me. “No boys allowed,” she says, and shuts the door. I knock again, calling, “Hey! What the hell? I know Jessica! I’m her boyfriend!” The door opens once again, and the same girl is peering at me through narrowed eyes. “Why do your eyes look so fucked?” she asks. “Because someone took my skin!” I explode. “I don’t have eyelids, okay!?” Suddenly, Jess appears behind the girl. “It’s okay, Ruby,” she says. Lindi Shi Untitled Charcoal and graphite

Lindi Shi Untitled Woodcut, lithography

I MUST HAVE LOOKED HORRIFIED AND THEY MUST HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR IT. AS SOON AS I LOOK UP INTO THE CROWD OF GIRLS, THEY BURST INTO A LAUGHTER I HAVE NEVER HEARD BEFORE, SCREAMING, STARVING, SINISTER.

“He’s the one.” Ruby gives me one more snarl and then flits back into the darkness, letting the door swing open. Jess hugs me with one arm and ushers me inside. “I have something pretty cool to show you,” I say to her as we travel through the downstairs hallway. I snake my hands around her waist. “Want to go upstairs?” “No,” she says. “We’re going to the kitchen.” Though I am always astounded at the level of hygiene with which these women maintain their living spaces, there is an odd aroma about the house today. Jessica lives in an old, enormous house with twenty of her closest friends, and this morning, it looks like every single one of them is milling about in the kitchen. I see Britta from last night and another hot one whom I recognize, both wielding spatulas in front of four pans, crackling with oil. Britta is clutching a familiar looking phone in one hand. “Is that my phone?” I ask her. “Yes,” she says, and smiles. “Would you like some, um, something to eat?” “No thanks,” I say, and then, “Shouldn’t you have the vent on to help with air circulation and smell?” “No!” says the other hot girl. “The smoke is really excellent for you.” I am about to inform her that smoke is not, in fact, excellent for any part of your body, when I notice a little sliver of color simmering in the pan. The blue is unmistakable, because it comes from a tattoo of a shark on my left forearm, and this is when I realize that the funny smell isn’t burnt potato, or even burnt chicken, but burnt skin. Burnt me. I must have looked horrified and they must have been waiting for it. As soon as I look up into

the crowd of girls, they burst into a laughter I have never heard before, screaming, starving, sinister. “It’s the newest beauty regime,” explains Jess. “All the celebrities are into it.” “I’m going to have a six-pack!” yells one girl from the crowd. “I’ll never have a pimple again!” calls another. Britta, fanning fumes towards her roommates, says, “Eating men is actually anti-cellulite. Megan Fox said that she’s hasn’t had to work out for even one day since she’s started. “What does any of this have to do with me?” I cry. “Look at my eyes!” “We thought you would be a nice test run,” says Jess. She shrugs. “And you were so wasted last night that the opportunity was just too good to pass up. The flesh, for maximum elasticity benefits, should be allowed to breathe while maintaining blood flow for at least six hours.” “Twelve is best,” adds Britta, nodding, peering into a glossy magazine. “And you did what, like ten?” She picks up the magazine and holds it to my chest, comparing. “See here? You’re going to be so flaky with the butter.” Then Britta holds my phone up to my face and snaps a flash photo, blinding me momentarily. “My blog is going to be lit after I post this.” “Excuse me?” I stutter. The women are all around me. “Jess, what about us? What about our love? We have reservations at Graze tomorrow night.” Jess sighs and turns her mediocre, asymmetrical face up towards mine in a last, hungered look. “Love? What good has love ever done us? Look at how close we are to being beautiful. This close.” Jess puts her hand on my arm. In her other is a bottle of barbecue sauce. “We’re touching.” l

FREE COVER LETTER TEMPLATE BY CALEB WEISNICHT [Today’s Date] [Your Addressee’s Name] [Your Addressee’s Professional Title] [Organization Name] [Organization Mailing Address] [City, State, Zip Code] Dear [Your Addressee’s Name]: I will be the sub250 lb., Phoenix Sunsera Charles Barkley of restocking your printer’s paper tray(s) with 8.5 by 11 acid free paper stock in a timely fashion and I am the George Michael w/ horseshoe goatee singing “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” live at Wembley Arena in 1991 of remembering doughnut and bagel preferences and I am the bad girl Demi Lovato ft. Nick Jonas of deep cleaning coffee makers on the brink of inoperability due to mineral deposit buildups and I am the middleaged Clint Eastwood as vengeful Missourian Josey Wales in the critically acclaimed 1976 revisionist western The Outlaw Josey Wales of responding to emails within 24 hours and I am the Richard Simmons of making small talk and “milling about” genially with coworkers before returning to work after an appropriate (and, as studies have shown, beneficial) period of bonding time and I am the Donald Trump’s hair of formatting spreadsheets and I am the Genesisera Peter Gabriel of making twosided color copies (collated) and I am the roughandtumble Mike Ditkahelmed 1985 Chicago Bears of recycling used ink cartridges and I am a coonskin cap made out of real coonskin hanging on a hook on your office’s west wall and I am the Teddy Roosevelt of elevator etiquette and I am the last of the Mohicans and I am Mount Rushmore in the chokedup dawn with your wife and kids in the car still sleeping and the car still popping like soda against the edge of its can. I am what this company needs. Sincerely yours, [Your Name]

Hillary Kuhlemeier The Fifties Lithograph

BY KARA WALKER BY REBECCA RIEDER

blacked ink, i crumbled in pieces leaving only the traced shape of my hands to remember me by, shrouded so that i was not shadows but silhouettes, and, like a blank canvas, my palms unfolding, there was not a thing to grasp outside myself, my pieces not shaped like themselves hands not traced like our self.

Maggie Beheler-Amass Shattered Photography

WHEN I AM

BY MATTHEW STOKDYK when I am becomes I was I love will still be I love; but when you are becomes you were, will it become you loved? I fear will fear that warmth will was and that alone will make me was.

Maggie Beheler-Amass Details Digital Collage

MEMORY OF A MAN

ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON BY ISAAC AMA It was the slow drip of morning coffee and the sting of evening scotch. The yellowed teeth and yellowed fingers and the smell that stayed in his clothes. It was how long the ash could get before it fell from the tip of his cigarette. Turkish Royals and Maxwell House; his five a.m. alarm and a rest in his recliner with todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s copy of The Wall Street Journal. It was the paper and the coffee. It was the cigarette and the nap. It was the smell of a morning fire.

HOW TO HANDLE OFFICE LUNCH BY JON SHAPIRO

ast summer, I worked at a tech-startup in the Midwest. They issued me a computer, a desk, a fedora, and a red Prius. The first day of the new job is brutal. New office, new rules, new people. By 8:45 a.m., I’ve already met six different Laurens. “Hey, you’re the new guy! I’m Kevin, I just wanted to welcome you to th—” “Sounds good Jack, I’ll keep it in mind.” I’ll be halfway to my desk before he realizes I don’t care about anything he’s saying. First days, they’re all the same. The best advice I ever got was from my Uncle Eric before my first day of kindergarten: “Remember, Jon, either beat someone up the first day, or become someone’s bitch.” Lunchtime is when you learn a lot about the politics that rule the office. Who comes over to say “hi,” who leaves for lunch and who brown bags it, where the jocks, nerds, and cheerleaders sit. It’s the first real test of how the office functions on a social level. So you better not fuck it up. During the 30 minutes you’re allotted for lunch, you enter your temple of prepackaged food and enjoy your freedom. It’s like one of those Wendy’s commercials where the judgmental redhead is suddenly in a garden eating her shitty Wendy’s salad. Except instead of a garden, you’re still in the office reading blogs. Sweet freedom!

There are no real rules to lunch in the office. More like subtle intricacies. But if you don’t pick up on the tricks of the trade quickly, you’ll get shanked in the conference room. Where you sit at lunch says a lot about you. Sitting in the break room on the first day is definitely a power play. If you do this, be ready to live up to the hype surrounding you. Bust through the double doors like you own the place and immediately start talking shit about another department. “HR, huh? May as well be, H-Are we for real, amirite?!” The other option is to eat at your desk like a hermit. A rumor mill involving trench coats and loose floorboards may start, but at least you’ll avoid being social. Lunch splits the day into two segments, so you should put off eating for as long as possible. Every minute you starve yourself during Workday Part I makes Workday Part II that much shorter. The farther into the afternoon you eat your lunch, the shorter the day feels. Ideally, you should be eating at 4:30 p.m., a half hour before the bell, and Workday Part II would be cake. But then it’s just a really early dinner and that’s ridiculous and you need food earlier in the day or you’ll break someone’s teeth with your keyboard. Realistically, you’ll whip out your lunch around 1 p.m. If you have brown paper bags, go with those. They leave people wondering what’s in your lunch, creating

an air of mystery around you. If all you have is gallon plastic Ziploc bags, these will get the job done, but they’re not ideal. My roommate/ father and I rarely make trips to the grocery store. Our bachelor pad is stocked with little more than expired ketchup and iced tea, excluding normal-for-lunch brown paper bags. So when I pack my lunch in see-through bags, everyone can see my food before I have a chance to eat it. It’s like they’re sucking out my lunch’s tasty soul. Quit eyeballin’ my Oreos, Payroll! Bring leftovers from the night before. One benefit of having my dad as a roommate is that we eat out a lot and often have leftovers in the fridge. Pizza for lunch? Half a crabcake? I want it all. As long as it doesn’t smell like Grandpa, you should strive to bring leftovers for lunch. Don’t bring a tuna sandwich on garlic bread with Kimchi and gym socks. If it smells alright, leftovers for lunch make you the coolest cat at the lunch table. “I’ll trade you my PB&J for your pepperoni pizza, Jon.” “Shove it, Timmy, I don’t want your mom’s reject sandwich.” On the days you don’t have leftovers to lazily tinfoil up and throw in your bag, you can always make a sandwich, but after you’re finished, you’ll always feel empty inside. Get creative after the entrée round. The chip course comes next, and the options are endless here, but try to stay away from the varieties that leave your hands looking

William Doty STILL LYFE WIT ALIENZ!!! Ink, Watercolor, Ink Jet Print on Paper

like you’re finger painting. After a bag of Cheetos, it usually looks like you just jerked off Chester Cheetah. Plus you don’t want powder cheese all over your computer. No, take tortilla chips. They make you feel ethnic. Granola bars always seem to find their way into lunches even though no one actually likes eating them. Despite what Big Granola may have you believe, they’re not candy bars. If they were candy, they’d be given out on Halloween, and I pray for the man who gives me granola on Halloween. Opening a Nature Valley bar is like getting hit by a fucking sand storm. I wiped the crumbs off my desk this

afternoon, straight into Lauren K’s leather bag by accident. I looked her right in the eyes and said, “This is mine now.” Just kidding, I didn’t say that. It was more of a loud moan that said “Well, you caught me, but I’m not gonna do anything about it.” Granola bars are there as a utility, just another piece of food to munch on, so they’re easily replaceable. Bring cashews or dry Frosted Flakes instead. Avoid bringing granola bars at all costs, unless you like choking down sugared tree bark. Eat your fruit last. It’s the worst part. Anyone who says they love fruit can fuck off. I don’t care how fresh it is, fruit is still not BBQ chips. How-

ever, fruit does give you a sugar boost to power through the rest of the day. Apples are nice because there’s the off chance you’ll get a piece stuck in your teeth, giving you something to work at for the next few hours. But they leave your hands infuriatingly sticky, something bananas have the decency to avoid. In the end, take fruit snacks if you have them. Unless the office has a wall-mounted ranch dressing dispenser you can bathe in, never take vegetables. Well, your 30 minutes is up. Your belly’s full and you’re ready to return to whatever it is you were pretending to do before lunch. Back to work, scallywag! l

JAMES IS GONE

Don’t cry. Listen. Even the birds know When to shut up. Not Even a crow sings today. Every choir boy should hold His breath. Take his tongue if you Need to. Get every Christian woman In a room, kneeling down, head bowed. Silent. Praying. Not for James. But for themselves. I want them in Easter dresses bright enough to burn in The hell they put him through. The hell they sent him to. Phone Ruben Mantz. Haley Prado. Elizabeth Robinson. Tell Them James is gone. Then speak to your grandmother. Tell her You know the truth you long suspected. James did not go with a Failing heart – the story her church, your church, his children’s choir’s Church, fed the masses like manna. Tell her you know the truth. The disease Her lips refuse to mention tired of its own repression and ﬁnally took the rest Of him. Instruct the children to burn their desks beneath the cross. Melt the podium On which he stood and pour it over the pulpit. Tear the books from the library shelves And stack them in the narthex. Invite the town to shred every page. No words can save Him now. He was lost before he left.

BY SPENCER MCAFEE-GUNDRUM

Caleb Weisnicht Flock Collage

Lana Scholtz Come to Your Senses Watercolor and ink

HEARTBEAT IN THE FINGERTIPS BY MOLLY WALLACE I wrote the words down And I guess it all made sense, Like saying sorry for something You didn’t do Just to make someone feel better I felt the lies accumulate at the end Of my spine, and My posture took note I folded like loose leaf paper into Someone’s pocket “Do you love me?” Scribbled between blue lines And ink shedding beyond the cloth Of their jeans It will remain but a stain, no matter Where the words end up. and I’m sorry for that.

JAWBREAKER BY CODY DUNN I’ve never seen my Dad take a punch, though I know he has. One-half his teeth are porcelain, like fine china or nesting dolls and they gray with age. One day, his hair will match his teeth and we will all buy new suits. He says a scar is hard-earned. He distrusts my nose like he distrusts my mom, craft beer or taxes. It is a bulbous, spark plug of a nose. It always looks broken, though it has never known a fight. Other kids used to call me Landshark, and since I get nosebleeds all winter, I’ve known the smell of blood more than most. So, it’s fine. Together, Dad and I can sense winter from a month away. It aches in his root beds, settles in a muzzle on my face. It gnaws him to see me like that, chinglisten and raw, reminds him of the night he cupped shattered jaw in his hands. “Some world,” he says, “where I have to chew on the left for life, and you get that bridge of blood vessels for free.”

Caleb Wesinicht Old Growth Watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, construction paper, paper bag

MENDOTA WITHSTANDING BY ALEXANDRA PLEASANT Thin-skinned hands, hard and fast, bear down on the surface. Not thunder, the lake. Yawning fractures and chary fate. Bare palms on the ice searching for a pulse. To feel it rifting apart. To feel Mendota break. Beneath your weigh maybe Mendota does the same, suspecting you on the other side presses her hard-hearted face against the frozen plane. Awaiting your faults to tear through, as from the weight beneath you.

Maggie Beheler-Amass Caress us with serendipity Digital collage

Yeline Del Carmen El Barrio Black sharpie and watercolor paint on sketchbook paper

FOR MY SISTER BY SHINE PETER

If they say that you are too dark, pray to the sky to bless you with stars, so that you may hang them in your skin. And if the hair on your body is black, abundant, above your lips and between your eyebrows and down your spine, like a trail to show you the way back home, know that your skin thanks you for protecting it. If they say that you smell like your motherland, claim it is your motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cooking, instead. As if home is about the street beneath your shoesnot the chili powder on her fingertips, not the coriander between your teeth? If they say that you are not welcome resphere, say that you are the child of six thousand years of sun on the salty waters, green like the earth we walk.

FOOD FOR KIDS: STANDING WITH THE WORLD, AGAINST HUNGER BY MIA SHEHADI

n the quiet village of Waunakee, Wisconsin, a local charity organization is making a loud statement. Jamie and Mick Holm have been running a local branch of Food for Kids for 10 years. Their goal: rid the world of starving children, adults, and families. On October 25th, the Waunakee Village Center hosted the 10th annual packaging event. With a goal of 250,000 meals, more than 1,200 volunteers of all ages joined together to produce 300,000 meals. Mick Holm grew up watching his father volunteer for this Minnesota-based organization. As his father devoted more and more time to Food for Kids, Mick decided he wanted to do the same. After convincing his wife, Jamie, and doing extensive research, the couple began their journey in becoming a big part of the world community. During their first event, they were able to package 85,000 meals, feeding around 1 million children. Although the Holmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s now claim it was a chaotic opening, it made a lasting impact in the lives of the volunteers that have been returning every year since. All the funds to buy the meals come from fundraisers that are hosted throughout the year, then all the food is given to relief organizations and food pantries for free. Each meal costs

the local Waunakee branch $0.15, which they receive from the main branch in Minnesota. Mick and Jamie then host the local packaging event, and ship the meals all around the world. The meals are designed by food scientists to provide maximum nutrition for malnourished individuals. With assorted dried vegetables, fortified dried soy, rice, and essential vitamins and minerals, one little bag can hold up to six one-cup meals. Rows and rows of tables are set up in the Waunakee Center. Each table is a team and is given a few big boxes of each raw element (e.g. rice, vegetables, vitamins, soy). Organized as an assembly line, a small plastic bag is passed down each side of the table, is filled with a scoop of each ingredient, is then sealed, and lastly put into boxes. Each of the boxes hold 216 meals and costs about $33 to make. Most of these soy-rice meals will be going to Malawi and are being distributed by the Children of the Nations organization. These meals specifically will be donated to the orphaned and destitute children. The other soy-based meals are being distributed to Honduras by Vision Honduras. Jamie and Mick Holm also donated some of these meals to local food pantries in Dane County. They discovered that, because of the design

of the meals to feed the malnourished, they didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t taste very good. So, besides adding some recipes for the recipient to try out with the soybased meals, Jamie and Mick decided to design a cinnamon oatmeal to distribute specifically to the local pantries. A friend of the couple is a career food scientist and helped design a more tasteful and nutritious cinnamon oatmeal product to give to the local pantries. The night of October 24th, 100 high school students volunteered to help package the oatmeal, producing 52,000 packages of food, which were sent to pantries all over southern Wisconsin. In the past, Food for Kids, Waunakee has provided food for the relief efforts in Sierra Leone and Liberia during the Ebola crisis. They have also donated to Haiti during the 2010 Earthquake and to the areas effected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The reach of this local organization is not limited by any means, providing comfort through food where it is needed. With powerful advertisement, it is no wonder that people decide to volunteer. Fliers adorned with facts on malnutrition are pinned up against the wall, reminding volunteers of the injustice they are helping to end: -1 out of every 8 people suffer from chronic undernourishment -870 million out of 7.1 billion. -World pop. by 2050= 9 billion. -Poor nutrition plays a role in 5

million child deaths each year -Even in the United States, 1 out of 5 kids struggle with hunger (16 million) -The world produces enough food to feed everyone! Besides the absolute majesty of seeing a community come together to help, it was a joy to see that most of the volunteers were under 10 years old. Jamie emphasized the importance of this fact: this leads to families coming back each year, then the children carry on doing volunteer work throughout their lives. “You would be surprised how few people volunteer,” Mick said “And that’s just because they don’t know where to go [to become

involved],” Jamie added. Many people from every walk of life joined together to help make this event as successful as it was. Everyone from church goers, to students, to returning university students were in attendance. Mick boasted about a University of Wisconsin-Whitewater student who had volunteered for Food for Kids in high school, and came back specifically to volunteer again this year, this time bringing a bunch of his friends to help out. At the school, the younger students will take tubes of M&Ms and go around their neighborhood asking for quarters. Each tube holds about $14 in quarters and will feed 96 children.

With teary and prideful eyes, Jamie and Mick leave the interview to let the volunteers know that they have reached their quarter million goal, with still an hour left of the event. This local group provides inspiration and change without asking for recognition, even though it’s deserved. Food for Kids brings people together, not just in the local community, but also in the world. They are taking a stand and making a difference by providing comfort to those who need it around the world. Be part of the movement by donating your time or money to this organization. Don’t forget that anyone can make a difference, no matter how small. l

Betsy Osterberger Untitled Photography

CHAMELEON Sometimes I wonder if education lost its voice in between textbooks, if playing hangman with our history could spell pride on our tongue. I listen to a lecture on the history of America, how this country was built from the ground up, That silence fills our classrooms because the taste of roots is too foreign. I remember my teacher asked me the highest level of education my parents reached? I told him elementary school. A man that seemed to have traveled the world with his eyes sewn to his lips looked at me puzzled. Wondering if the moon had escaped the galaxy of my eyes, Wondering if I had jumped a border of 50 American bullets, To him, I was a potential dropout. He made me question if my skeleton would break after he returned to his desk, I did not bother to ask if he believed I’d be a statistic, He had already placed me in the back of the classroom. I felt the urban in my body turn to limp leaves, How the stem of my backbone was made for lifting and pushing, The oxygen in my body was worth more with the Earth, than living in it. In that moment I wanted the chameleon corpse of my lungs to keep breathing, To hold my heritage closer to my scoliosis spine. I belonged to a melting pot of English and Spanish and didn’t know which was easier to swallow, So I rolled my r’s like dice and studied my tests like homicide, Because I refuse to be made an 11 o’ clock news story. My fingers created the freedom that my mouth could not, I held my pencil tighter than any textbook, my pencil saw no rhythm in skin color.

CORPSE BY FRANCISCO VELAZQUEZ I feel my skin is segregation from 7AM til 2PM. I want to crawl from my flesh and hide in the power of my ancestors. The pyramids of my country have only been featured in one chapter, The amount of drop-outs from my country have been made the headlining topic each week. “Asian-American and white students are still far more likely to graduate than Latino and African-American students.” I don’t believe in change when our future is based on the neighborhoods we grew up in. How can a Latino or African-American be expected to graduate when we have to watch our shoulder to make sure we aren’t the next rest in peace (R.I.P.) protest, How do you expect any progression when you have to work below minimum wage because the only green you carry isn’t valid in this country, Is there enough time to study a textbook when your education won’t get you anywhere without money, Education is a crisis. Breathing is a crisis. School is a demand. School is a necessity. Society is peer pressure lips. Teaching is lost. My classroom will witness more failures than graduates as education keeps losing its voice, Parents will witness more funerals than orientations for college. Students will live in the slums of their throats, Where teachers have placed pigment to the back and potential in the front. I hold my legacy in the left side of my wallet, I will remember my teacher’s words, I will graduate with my heritage as a witness that my roots kept me alive.

TRIPLE A BY JOHN MCCRACKEN

lighting roadside flares by the roadside, we talked about wearing lampshades in the shade. We wanted to celebrate with celebrates, go stargazing with the stars. We talked about wearing lampshades in the shade meanwhile, Ashton Kutcher’s in the kitchen we wanted to celebrate with celebrities, whipping up car bombs to forget about bombed cars. Meanwhile, Ashton Kutcher’s in the kitchen, I’m in the backseat on this backstreet, whipping up car bombs to forget about bombed cars fucking listening to boys talk about fucking. I’m in the backseat on this backstreet on the icy road we rode, fucking listening to boys talk about fucking, turned around we turned over. On the icy road we rode, broken down with the windshield breaking, turned around we turned over, so we buffed out dents trying to look buff. Broken down with the windshield breaking, boys fucking love talking about fucking, we buffed out dents trying to look buff, They wish they were back home with nothing to wear. Boys fucking love talking about fucking laying bare ass, barely able to get some ass. They wish they were back home with nothing to wear, he talks about cuming knowing she’s not coming. I’m in the backseat on this backstreet, we wanted to celebrate with celebrities, I’m fucking listening to boys talk about fucking, and we’re lighting roadside flares by the roadside.

William Doty Beta Cuck Ink Jet Print on Paper

IMPACT JOINTS BY LOUISE LYALL

The bearded men call my grandfather bones because he knew them allâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; tibula, fibula the name of each rib, clavicle, paetella, toyota tacoma to chevy silverado. The way skin peels back like the soft shell of an orange, sour-sweet and bitter behind the roots of the tongue, when broken open with a sterilized scalpel, hairline instead of compound breakage, clean hands, too steady to hold a pen between thumb and forefinger, just steady enough to peel off an eggshell, rubber gloves are too thin and too small to hold his fingers still. We are sturdy people, as our forefathers were, bones found he fossilized in time, knuckles beaten away by eons of blood and motorcycle accidents. He learned fear of losing and therefore religion, pedestaled presidents, gave power to the people he lost. His hands are broken compound, with them atria and ventricles, father, son and holy spirit. he is father and son, holy to the bones in spirit, to the closeted skeletons and stationary dead. He learns the bones, sleeping underwater, skin, fresh meat, they fit together like you and i do. Fixer of Bones, his knuckles buckled under their own weight of too many years.

Kimberly Watanabe Geology Study Charcoal

Genevieve Anderegg Up in Smoke Markers on Bristol

TWO STEPPING BY NAILAH FRYE He didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop until he broke the phone - plastic splitting quick against my femur. I sucked my teeth to set him off. That phone grew legs, fancied itself a boxer. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard to notice the particular way dust moves until you are on your back and your body is a minefield and your man is Macgyver, could make the air a weapon if he wanted. Then you see how dust dances legatto, when the hairpin routine bursts open. I am still, switchblade ticking in my back right pocket - not today. I am still and he is moving fast and heavy, dancing in his way.

NO RED TENT PARTY BY KRISTA BROWN

I was chatting on A.I.M when it happened. I didn’t feel any different, the world didn’t suddenly tilt from its axis, I just went to the bathroom, looked down at my underwear and saw an oblong stain of red that ruined my white cotton Hanes. It wasn’t the red of a massacre or even the sultry red of becoming a woman, just plain old uterine-lining red. There was no party, no celebration, no cards, no one even whispered congratulations. I called my mom into the bathroom. She smiled but was not proud- Sympathy. I didn’t get what we were mourning. We went through the basics. Covering that I couldn’t go swimming till I mastered shoving cotton into myself, but was now capable of having children. I changed my underwear and went back to chatting about middle school on the computer. That night with my very first toilet paper-pad fashioned between my thighs I scribbled in red pen that I didn’t think the sudden shedding of childhood would happen so plainly. The only smile I got barely showed any teeth.

NEW WOMAN

BY KIYOKO REIDY

Last night, I found him in bed with a new woman. She was electric, red-bodied knobs perfectly placed. Running his sticky palms over the length of herâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; Strings untrimmed, he plucked at her delicately sliding up her neck a crystalline crescendo, she wailed beneath his calloused fingers the perfect woman (a humorless oxymoron)â&#x20AC;&#x201C; loud in bed, well-tuned a fondness for his hands. She is a Gibson, he said but she looked cheap to me.

DIG AND SAVE BY DILLON BURCH 5 dollars is plenty today. Silver spoons overflow with milk and morning cartoons before we venture through the newly frosted winter frontier to the land where misfits enjoy. Patient snowy steps lighting skinny cigarettes lead the path to bequeathed baskets of baggy hoodies and XXXL panties. Mounds of awkward shaped sweaters and overly washed fabrics cover the rough diamond flannels I’ve come to retrieve. There are no fitting rooms here, only old women standing by watching and smiling as I try on satin suit jackets and sun hats. Maybe they want them for themselves. I didn’t find what I came for but I never do. A white collared shirt and blue suspenders with gold clips are my findings for the day. Missing buttons, worn away cuffs, and lost colors don’t bother me. I too am broken and coffee stained.

Kimberly Watanabe Untitled Acrylic and tissue paper

HA’EMET OR THE TRUTH I LEARNED FROM YOU IN GOOD FAITH BY EVA JACOBS

My mother is an atheist, any notion of God obscured by the weight bearing down on her bent back, obscured by the burn from the crack of the whip, down her spine neurons firing, incomplete— —they can’t reach their destination A benevolent God wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t take the human body and turn it in on itself, eating away at itself, for he created it himself, and he said it was good, right He wouldn’t take her legs and wrap them in the resounding silence of questions unanswered She is Atlas, holding up the world Holding up the weight of everyone else’s faith that she was chosen to bear arbitrarily but cannot share— I guess that’s why she always seems so tired He wouldn’t steal away her livelihood, her autonomy, my childhood Wouldn’t render us immobile, make us perpetually paralyzed, me pathologically petrified to move forward for fear of leaving her behind, no— a benevolent God wouldn’t do this. I want to tell her I found Him, for her, but sometimes I falter, What does it mean to find God today, anyway Too often I lose him in the skies, asphyxiated there by the fear that I’ll become her successor, holding up the world like her, and her mother before her Like mother, like daughter, I guess he meant it when he said he’d punish me for the sins of my father

But for her sake I search and for her sake I tell her that in my temple, I find no fear of a diagnosis In my temple, I hear a promise: Lech-lecha m’artzecha el-haeretz asher arecha. “Go from your homeland, to a land that I will show you.” I hear, L’shanah haba’ah b’yerushalayim. “Next year in Jerusalem.” I hear go, but don’t forget from whence you came, don’t forget who paved the way, Go free, but never forget to come home I can tell her that, in my temple, I hear the voices of Ruth and Esther, the wisdom of the Song of Songs I hear “I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, not to give your love away until it is ready.” I hear live, but live steady— even if your gait isn’t. I hear don’t be ashamed of your identity— even if it makes you different. I hear live with unabashed integrity, an open heart in the face of misfortune. I hear value your community, no matter how small or strange, I hear always be a voice for change with your eyes ever on the horizon. Be better than the generation before you, and teach your children what you lacked then. And so I put my faith not in the word of a book, but in the heart of a living document that aims to explain identity. An identity that began before a dream of a dream of a distant time, that survived oppression, prejudice, exile, Exodus, and mass genocide. An identity that could not be exterminated, refused to be terminated or lost in our Diaspora. Not burned away by the multiple sclerosis, it seeps from under the floorboards at home, Dor l’dor, it goes: “Generation to generation,” it grows Teaching me resilience, spirit, community, tenacity, and that is my true inheritance. I was raised with all the evidence I needed to believe in something.

Kimberly Watanabe Untitled Oil

YOU

BY ELLA RAUSCH My first love was the mountains They took me home Stole my breath Jagged And Soft Harsh But Forgiving Surprising Though Certain The only thing in my life that never disappointed When I think of mountains I imagine Sunsets Flora Serenity And wonder how with time Everything adapts Evolves Is refined Including me I wish mountains would never change But they erode Crumble Endure harsh weather Are beaten down And despite this transformation I still love them And they continue to stand tall. My first love was the mountains And my last will be you.

RAYMOND ROAD BY ZOE TOWNSEND

never go down Raymond Road anymore, not since my mother moved to a smaller apartment across the city. I have no reason to, really. My sister moved to Cleveland and my mom moved to the east side and I don’t know where you live anymore. I took the bus home from a job interview and when it stopped at Raymond and Carlisle, right in front of the Safeway, I got off because I had to pee and it was another forty-five minutes on the bus until I got home. I wondered if he still worked there, your boyfriend-turned-husband, but when I asked the cashier she didn’t recognize his name. It makes sense, of course. I wouldn’t want to work at Safeway for seven years, either. I left the store with a ninety-five cent donut, up from sixty-seven cents when we were in middle school. It seemed rude to use the bathroom without buying anything. It was a nice day for March and a horrible day for June but I decided to walk down Raymond Road while I waited for the next bus to come by. Supposedly they ran on the half hour but when you get as far out as Raymond Road, time seems less relevant and the busses come whenever they please. You always used to be late to school because you didn’t want to wake up in time for the 7:14 a.m. bus, the one I always took. For a while I called you every morning at six hoping you would ride it with me, but usually you just rolled over and went back to sleep after I hung up. We used to walk down Raymond Road on our way back from the 7-Eleven, lips blue from slushies. We used to hold the sweating cups to the back of each other’s necks, tilting them horizontal but not far enough that we’d spill melting slush down our backs. It didn’t always work out that way, did it? More than once, we ran up the stairs to your apartment, shrieking about a tank top accidentally dyed blue, while your mother clucked at us from the kitchen. “Girls,” she’d say. “So messy.” I walked past the squat four unit apartment buildings and faded duplexes that lined Raymond Road, and thought about how we dodged broken bottles with flip-flopped feet on our way home from the park. You know, those foam and plastic two-for-five flip flops that came in every color known to man? They sold them at Old Navy, but we got ours from wire bins in the back left corner of Safeway, near the frozen pizza. I never wear flip-flops anymore, you know.

Maggie Beheler-Amass Weathered Photography

I remember how the first week of summer, without fail, those plastic straps would rub between my toes and on the sides of my foot, causing blisters. That is what walking down Raymond Road made me think of. Passing those apartment buildings and our neighbors who lived in them, I kept thinking about those blisters. There never was any air conditioning, and it drove us all outside, desperate to catch a breeze. I loved it, the days so hot all you could do was lie out on a towel in the strip of grass between apartment and sidewalk and sweat under the oppressive heat. You used to stand over me as a way of saying hello, blocking the sun and insisting we go to the two-dollar movie theater, where the air conditioning was turned just a little too high and the popcorn was stale but bottom-

less. One day, the August before our first year of middle school, you dragged me down Raymond Road while I complained about those flipflops and how the sweat mixed with those plastic straps were chafing my feet to bits. I took off those infernal flip-flops and walked nearly two blocks barefoot before I stepped on broken glass and sliced open my foot. No one walks barefoot on Raymond Road, no one but a dumb kid in cheap plastic sandals. I had to get stitches, and you held my hand the whole time. I was still limping a little, used to favoring my right foot, when school started. Everyone called me “Gimpy” for a month and you did too. That was all right, because I was the Gimpy to your Gappy. Braces could’ve fixed those teeth of yours, but who had the time for those on Raymond

Road? Your mother convinced you not to get them, against the dentist’s advice. They hurt, and you couldn’t chew gum or eat popcorn, and your apples would always have to be cut up. You agreed. After all, how could you get your first kiss when you had a braces-face? I passed that 7-Eleven and I thought about how we used to steal Juicy Fruit and Slim Jims, telling ourselves that we were diverting their attention by buying those blue slushies. I don’t eat meat anymore, and I like chewing cinnamon gum instead, now. With how tight we wore our clothes, you would’ve thought the cashiers would see the outlines of the Slim Jims we stuck in our waistbands. Remember how we used to stay up until 4 a.m. just because we could? Remember when your mother caught us sneaking back into

Thomas Yonash May (Series) Digital photography

the apartment a bit past midnight, arms full of as much Mountain Dew and gummy candy as my babysitting money would get us? She laughed and let us off the hook because, she said, she was just glad we came home with junk food instead of hickeys. Of course you remember, even if you don’t eat gummy candy anymore. I saw a picture of you online a couple months ago, where you had adult braces and I texted you about it, but you never replied. Last year, when I was helping my mom pack for the move, I found my old dress from our first dance freshman year. Hot pink and poofy with sparkles that could only be called excessive. It was an absolute disaster of a dress, and I felt like a princess in it. Yours was lime green, and my mother said we looked like two gumdrops she could pluck up and eat. In retrospect, that wasn’t a compliment. We ran flat irons through our hair until every strand was stick straight and heat-frazzled, though my hair hardly needed it. I don’t even own one, now. Our eye makeup was so dark we looked like raccoons with two black eyes, a fact both our mothers were eager to point out. When we got to the dance, you and I stood in the door of the gym, paper streamers fluttering around us, and I thought that life couldn’t possibly get better than this. “Why do the other girls have flowers on their wrists?” you asked me. I watched your eyes dart around the gym as you nervously smoothed the layers of glittery tulle on your dress. I shrugged, figuring it was some fashion trend we’d missed. Our dresses were so stylishly puffy and sparkly, I hardly thought anyone would notice we were missing some silly flower. It turns out they were corsages, and by the mid-winter formal you were obsessed with finding a boy to be your date, and more importantly, bring you a corsage. As we walked the two blocks down Raymond Road from the bus

stop after the dance, I wished that I could wear this dress again someday and feel so beautiful and you wished you had a boyfriend. We had left a trail of glitter on the blue metro bus seats, and that Monday morning on our way back to school I could have sworn some of it was still there. As we walked you detailed every boy who could ask you to Midwinter that January and which one would be best at picking out a corsage. I think you decided on a set of twins from the cross country team who would take us both. They didn’t. I desperately wanted to take off my heels, but the puckered scar on my left foot told me it was safest to keep them on. That night was only the second time in my life I had worn heels; I hated them at fourteen and I still hate them now. I was wearing heels as I walked back from that job interview, and I wanted to take them off as well. Modest one-and-three-quarter inch pumps, and I know you would have called them boring. Our junior prom we both went with seniors and you were already well versed in dating boys. I was well versed in bringing you Twizzlers and tissues after those boys broke your heart. You were so patient curling my hair before that dance and you didn’t even comment on how much of your hairspray I used trying to make the fine strands hold a curl. I was so impatient, burning the side of your neck and a hank of hair while you screeched and I couldn’t figure out how to release the curling iron. I cried because you were going to look so pretty and I had messed it up, and you hugged me, laughing, while you held a bag of frozen peas to your neck. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” you told me. “I’ll just pin it to one side.” I knew that was a lie because you had been fretting over every aspect of your outfit since February; you had spray tanned your ankles, afraid someone would see how pale

IT WAS AN ABSOLUTE DISASTER OF A DRESS ... YOURS WAS LIME GREEN, AND MY MOTHER SAID WE LOOKED LIKE TWO GUMDROPS SHE COULD PLUCK UP AND EAT. they were if you lifted the hem of your dress. I still feel bad about that, sometimes, even though your hair has grown back and we haven’t talked in at least a year. For our senior prom you had a date and I didn’t, but it wasn’t supposed to be like that. He asked me first and I told him that you and I were planning on going together without dates, which was true. After that last boy, who broke up with you on New Year’s Eve, you’d declared yourself single for the year and I was proud of you for making it until May. In first period Calculus — you always told me I’d never find a boy worth dating in Calculus — he asked me to the dance and I said yes because everyone was watching me and maybe a bit of me liked that smart boy with neat hair in a button down shirt and khakis that looked handsome rather than nerdy, preppy in a way people from Raymond Road

never are. Fifty minutes later, leaving class, I told him, “No, no, I take it back.” I said you would be mad at me because we were already planning on making it a girls’ night. He walked off in a huff and that evening on the bus home from track practice, another activity in which I would never find a boy worth dating, I saw I had eleven text messages, three missed calls, and a voicemail from you. I started to text you back but you called again first. “You’ll never believe what happened to me today!” you said in the voice you saved especially for describing your next boyfriend. Before I could guess, you told me the answer. “I have a date. To the dance. On Saturday. Do you think he’ll have time to get a tie to match my dress?” “I thought we were going without dates,” I said, cautiously, wondering if that boy with the clean hair and khakis would let me say yes again. “Someone asked me today and I said no.” “Who? Who?” you asked, so excited you sounded like an owl. “Wait, guess who asked me.” And again before I could guess you told me it

AFTER THE CEREMONY AND ALL THROUGH OUR GRADUATION PARTY YOU CLUNG TO HIS ARM AND HE CLUNG TO YOUR CURVES.

was the boy with the preppy clothes and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take back my no. “But who asked you?” you continued. “Nobody, just some guy from track,” I told you. “I would’ve said yes if I knew you had a date, but it’s not a big deal.” “Take it back,” you said. “Tell him you changed your mind. Any one of those track guys would love to have you as a date.” “It’s really not an issue. I didn’t like him at all.” “Who was it?” you pressed, and I told you he was a junior. “Younger guys are so immature,” you told me. “It’s probably best you said no.” Of course it was a big deal, but I had learned from years and years spent with you that arguing only ended in tears on your end and frustration on mine. I never got a picture alone with you at our high school graduation. You’d been seeing him for just a month, and after the ceremony and all through our graduation party you clung to his arm and he clung to your curves. I was mad at him because I barely got to talk to you. I went up to ask you for a picture and he flicked the white honor roll cord I was still wearing, still wearing over my dress even after taking off my robe, and I remember how he laughed and said he couldn’t believe that even with that cord I was still just going to community college. It was the same thing I told myself, you know. That white cord wouldn’t get me anywhere; it was the yellow high honor roll cord that would have gotten me a scholarship somewhere better. I was mad because he didn’t seem care that you’d graduated, only that he had, even though you were the best writer in our grade, even though you read a poem at graduation, even though only half the girls from Raymond Road ever graduated and we were lucky to be two of them. It never occurred to me to point out

that he wasn’t going to school at all. You were going to community college, too, for cosmetology and I was going for the dental hygienist program, and we would eat lunch together every Tuesday and Thursday at 1 p.m. when our schedules allowed. We were going to rent an apartment together, a studio on Jennings Avenue, which we would divide in half with curtains when we needed space to ourselves. It seems ridiculous to me, now, that we thought we could share two hundred square feet. I would have hated you by the end. “That was rude of him to say,” I told you, cornering you as you left the bathroom. “About community college.” “It was just a joke,” you replied. “You’re so uptight sometimes.” “I’m uptight because I don’t like people insulting me? You’re going to community college, too.” “He was joking. If you mellowed out a bit, maybe more guys would like you.” “Plenty of guys like me,” I said with more hurt in my voice than I like to admit. “But I’d rather have no one like me than date all these... you know.” “No, I don’t know,” you replied, lips pursed, shoulders scrunched, and sandaled foot tapping against the faded carpet. “Are you saying I date too many men?” “I’m saying I’d rather just wait for the right one than date around—” “Date around?” you asked. “You mean sleep around? Are you calling me a loose woman?” I would argue that at the point you met him, he was more of a boy and we were far from women. But that day, I threw my hands in the air and stormed across the street, from your building to mine. You were insufferable sometimes, you know. I wonder if you still are. I made you box mix brownies the next day and they were still cooling in the pan when you

Thomas Yonash May (Series) Digital photography

pressed the buzzer, standing on the stoop with two slushies and a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese. “I got you cherry,” you said. “They were all out of blue raspberry.” “What’s the mac ’n’ cheese for?” I asked. “I thought you’d like it.” I did. I did like it and I remembered how we used to eat that same mac ’n’ cheese, planted in front of the television. I remembered how neither of us had cable but I had a tape of SpongeBob episodes, and how we watched all eleven in a row one Saturday while my mom was at work and my sister was out. I bet I still have that tape somewhere, but I know the VCR is gone. My mother was the last on our block to switch over to a DVD player, finally giving in when my sister stuck a piece of

peanut butter toast in the VCR. That Independence Day, a month before we were slated to move into that studio on Jennings Avenue, you pulled me aside while fireworks ripped through the sky. “He asked me to move in with him!” you said. “What about me?” I asked, thinking of the lease we’d signed back in April, the day after I turned eighteen. “I mean, you know it wouldn’t have lasted long, I would have moved in with him eventually. We’ll still see each other at school,” you added. “Eventually didn’t have to be now,” I said, the closest to hysterical I’ve been yet. “It could have been next year. We’ve already signed the lease. Who will live with me? What

if no one will?” “Calm down,” you said. “It will work out.” “It will not work out. Tell him no.” “He said he loves me,” you said, and I thought but didn’t say that he only loved himself. “That doesn’t mean you should move in with him. You’ve been dating for two months.” You took a deep breath and even in the dark I knew your hands were balled into fists at your side, your shoulders scrunched. “Look,” you said. “You’ve never been in a relationship that lasts this long, so I don’t think you’d—” “Two months is not a long time.” “He’s different,” you told me. “I mean, I could be with him for the rest of my life.” I nodded, too hurt to be worried

Thomas Yonash May (Series) Digital photography

about what this would mean for you. You gave me a list of other girls from our grade who would be at the community college, who would probably just love to share an apartment with me. It was a prime location, after all, a twenty-minute bus ride to the school instead of the hour and forty-five minute ride from Raymond Road. I did move in with one of them, and we couldn’t stand the sight of each other by Christmas. I never did dishes and she listened to music at all hours of the night. At the time I was convinced it was her, but thinking back I realize two hundred square feet is too small to share with anyone but a cat. We didn’t see each other at school that fall, though. I begged you to get dinner with me the night before class started, but you insisted you had plans with him. He was called into work, though, and I was headed out the door to the bus stop

the moment I saw your name on my phone screen. It was nearly two hours to your apartment, in a part of town near where we’d grown up that I’d never had a reason to go to. Your apartment had air conditioning, and I was so used to being without it that it made your otherwise cozy living room feel sterile and unwelcoming. We ordered pizza and once we were done you hid the box in the neighbor’s trash and never explained why. I remember asking you what time your classes started the next day and I remember your off-handed tone when you said you wouldn’t be going to school. “Why?” I asked. You had never been the best student but there had never been a question of whether or not you would go. You wanted to get a cosmetology license and the community college had a decent program. “I decided not to,” you said. “I

don’t actually know if I’d like cosmetology. It doesn’t make sense to go if I might not like it.” I would later find out that when you told your mother you were moving in with him, she pulled all financial support. “It makes perfect sense,” I said. “That’s how you find out.” “School isn’t really my thing,” you insisted. “It’s a waste of money.” “You get a degree so you can support yourself. Do you want to work at Chili’s forever?” “I quit Chili’s,” you told me. “It was stressful.” “You should have quit months ago.” “Well, I quit last Thursday. I threw my apron in the manager’s face and walked out.” “Good.” “He makes enough so that I don’t even need to work,” you said. “He just got promoted.” I held my tongue and didn’t mention that

being a manager at Safeway wasn’t the best way to spend forever either. I know now that he didn’t, but I can’t imagine he’s doing something much better. “I wish I had that much free time.” I said. You didn’t work, you weren’t going to school, and you hadn’t answered more than a few of my texts in the past month. I wondered what it was you did all day. “It’s a bit boring,” you added. “I watch a lot of TV.” “Why not get another job?” You shrugged. “Does he not want you to work?” I asked. I was suspicious; I was always suspicious of that boy who asked you out because I said no. It was sleazy and I didn’t trust him. “I don’t need to,” you replied. “He doesn’t care if I do, I just don’t need to. Why would you ask that?” “I was wondering.” “Why were you wondering?” “It just seems like,” I paused, searching for words, “like maybe he makes a few more decisions in the relationship than you do.” “That’s not true. Take that back.” “It’s just what it looks like to me. It doesn’t mean it’s what’s actually happening.” “Take it back,” you demZanded. I shook my head. “It’s what I see.” “You’re just jealous no one will date you,” you said, and I admit that it hurt. “I’d rather be single than date someone like him,” I retorted. “Sometimes I think you’d rather be single than date anyone,” you replied. “I haven’t found anyone I like yet,” I said, and a little bit of me

wondered if I had said yes to him back in May if I would be sitting at home, watching TV, rather than splitting my time between waiting tables, studying, and being a woefully bad salesgirl at Gap Kids. You raised an eyebrow, and neither of us said anything else on the subject for the rest of the evening. That night was the first time I really worried about you. I went to my first day of classes with puffy eyes and a headache, the latter which would follow me through the next seven years as I struggled through school. Sometimes I even wondered if you had the right idea. I was never big on school when we were younger, I was always the one looking up movie times that were purposefully during class and taking lunch hours that lasted until the end of the school day. I almost skipped that first day of class, too. I sat in the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street from the community college and wondered why the girl who couldn’t sit through all six blocks in a day of high school thought she could go to college. I did go, though. I told myself I could have a second donut if I did. You always told me that was a ridiculous way of rewarding myself, and I should have however many donuts I wanted for any reason whatsoever. I still go to Dunkin’ Donuts at least once a week. There are so many in this city, it’s hard for me to resist. You called me a week later to apologize while I was looking over notes from Dental Health Safety and Oral Anatomy. You stayed on the phone just long enough for us to

make dirty jokes about that second class, and then I heard him call to you from the other room. “I’ve got to go,” you said. “Because he’s telling you to?” I responded. “Let’s not fight again, please.” “We never talk. I never see you. It’s like we have completely different lives.” “We do,” you said. “You’re so busy with school. You don’t want to hear about me sitting around at home.” He called you again and I wondered what I had ever found appealing about that boy. “I’ve got to go, really,” you told me. “We have plans.” It took me an associate’s degree and six months on the job to realize prodding peoples’ gums and reminding them to floss was not for me, but I kept working at dentists’ offices while I went to the fouryear college the next city over. I drove my mother’s car there every Tuesday and Thursday and it took me four and a half years to do two years’ worth of classes. For a while I worked at the dentist office two blocks from our old middle school, but the dentist had a reputation for wandering hands and I quit after less than a year. One day you and he came in, and it was almost sweet how you scheduled your teeth cleaning appointments at the same time. Almost. If you had said a word to me, one word at all, it would have been. You texted me after, a “sorry,” and a, “he would have been mad,” though you never explained why. That dentist’s office is gone now and in its place is a dirt lot.

THINKING BACK, I REALIZE TWO HUNDRED SQUARE FEET IS TOO SMALL TO SHARE WITH ANYONE BUT A CAT. 69

I told you, over and over, that he was no good. I told you so many times that you should have hated me. We fought but you always forgave me, and I think a bit of you knew he was trouble too. We didn’t talk much while I was in school, and we saw each other even less, but I still saw your pictures online. Our old friends would comment that you and him looked so happy, so perfect, what a wonderful couple; all I could see was how his arm was tensed around your shoulders, pulling you into his side. I could see half a smile on your lips, a normal smile for some but far too lackluster for you. I missed your gap-toothed smile more than ever when I saw those pictures, and I wondered how anyone who had seen you smile before could mistake you for happy. I think I remember a lunch date we had, back when he still let you talk to me. You picked the bacon and walnuts out of a salad, and I thought that the you I knew would have never passed up on a burger and fries, and even when you chose a salad it was doused in ranch dressing. “Do you think I’m fat?” you asked. Of course I said no, and you weren’t. We wore the same size shoes and shirts, though your bras were three cup sizes larger. My mother always told me this was why you got more dates than me. “Well, he usually likes his girls a bit smaller than me,” you said. I probably swore, but for politeness sake I said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” You rattled off a list of his old girlfriends, and what size jeans they probably wore. “And he said girls my size shouldn’t wear tank tops,” you added, almost as an afterthought. “It makes us look slutty.” You always

hated sleeves, hated anything touching your arms. I always thought that was weird, how you would peel off your coat as soon as we got inside to reveal spaghetti straps, even in the middle of January. I saw only one picture of your wedding. You and he stood on the courthouse steps, his smile charming and wide, yours tightlipped and tiny. There were no bridesmaids, no best man. A friend of his had been the witness; he was the one who took the picture. Your shoulders bent in and you were thinner than ever. There were circles under your eyes so dark they made you look as much like a raccoon as we at that first dance, but you weren’t wearing any makeup. I hadn’t seen you without makeup, whether carefully applied or just flecks of mascara left on your eyelashes after washing your face, since you turned thirteen and your mother let you start wearing it. You looked so unhappy, a gray cardigan over a plain, knee-length white dress. Even our senior year of high school, when sleek was in and everyone wore tight black dresses to the dances, yours had sequins. I remember how we used to plan our weddings to modern-day Prince Charmings at our sleepovers all through middle and high school. It was all about the dresses, long and sleek, short and flirty, covered in feathers or glitter or lace, not the man. You called me about a year ago, at 1 p.m. on a Thursday when I was out shopping for a dress for graduation, rather than finishing the paper that determined whether I would or not. It was the first time in a long time that we’d talked, and the first in an even longer time that it didn’t end in an argument. “I was thinking about how you

always listened to my boy troubles,” you said. “Well, they were always more interesting than mine.” I replied, and we laughed because it was the truth. I wasn’t in a relationship that lasted longer than two dates until my sophomore year of college. “You always gave me good advice,” you told me. “And you never listened.” “I did, once,” you argued. “When that boy I dated junior year would let his dog stay in the room while we—” “He broke up with you,” I interrupted, falling so easily into our old rhythm. “You didn’t listen to me.” “He broke up with me because I made him put the dog out.” “You never told me that.” I said. “Because at the time I thought it was horrible advice,” you replied. “He broke up with me, after all. I just wanted the dog out of his bedroom. Still,” you continued. “You always gave me good advice.” “It looks like I was wrong about him, though,” I said. “Yeah,” you said noncommittally, though at the time I didn’t pick up on your tone. “How’s the married life treating you?” I asked. “Oh, good,” you said, then paused. “Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you—” I interrupted you, told you to hold that thought until I checked out. I forgot to call you back, though, and at that point you were such a small part of my life, I didn’t think it would matter if I did. Besides, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold my tongue when the topic was him, and I knew no matter if you thought my advice in high school had been good, you wouldn’t listen now. Then again, maybe you would have. l

SCHIZOPHRENIA BY MAJAH CARBERRY

You: you sit in the chair like a nest your wings heavy with salt. The apartment walls are colored the end of days and burnt sienna cigarettes. You’re trying to speak to me, to explain, but your words are frayed threads, small sparrows with cracked beaks. They slip and spill off your tongue, they rub into the carpet, they drip into your palms and get sucked up among the dust motes; they vanish through our open window screens. I’m trying to magnify your whisper words, to unfurl sentences lost among the scattered electricity of your brain, but they are gone; they lay flat and senseless against the downward pull of your cheeks. I’m scared because I can see your voice calling and calling, from the small center of your body, lost and minimized among the forest of your lungs. Our wiring won’t connect, we give up as you curl under that blanket, a felt green cocoon.

Maggie Beheler-Amass Tout Est IlluminĂŠ Digital Collage

SANDBAR BY MAJAH CARBERRY

One firefly blue tent sits there like a pale lantern, quiet on the sand, canvas skin pulsing its translucent wings. The cold seeps like chemicals deep into my skin, it sets my blood blue and buzzing, aglow and filling with poured, black velvet, as the river and sky twist and melt, chain themselves into mesh and blankets. A thousand pounds of smoke spirals and snaps, tosses red flashes against the stars, those fairy eyes, blinking and streaking, trailing white acrylic paint from their thin fingernails, leaving the night stained, chilled, and breathless.

BY ALEXANDRA PLEASANT

CHAOS THEORY 74

I was born screaming like the brakes of a lumber train, and you of far more cautious things. Like falling, like love with a Math major, whose manic bipolarity like chaos theory. Numbers to rule the singularities. And as far as evolution is concerned, Humans have neither the Head nor Heart to grapple with numbers larger than our lives. Infinity to evade us infinitely. For all his love of numbers his mind won’t let him see. He at times misses me. With book in bedroom doorway. But he catches the impossible numbers in the blue of my eyes. I tell him it’s the numbers at fault for his bad days. He’d say Shakespeare is the fault of mine, but he won’t admit I have bad days. They are a disease to him. And I’m fine I say I’m okay and I’m not supposed to lie. But He’s afraid our bad days will align. Eclipse each other, everything else. That the world will end in the space between us. As I lie across from him in bed. We’d pretend we could stay like that. Watch days turn over from spring to summer to fingerfall on a typewriter. Stealing seasons, and toying with silent reasons he finds gravity in calculus but not in me. It’s the manic that stays and the love that flees these children screaming like trains and careful calculations.

William Doty Being Sexy Ink Jet Print and Cardboard Collage

IF I HAD A HOUSE AND YOU LIVED IN IT BY CEDAR FOX

Brittany Fahres Push You Away Oil on Canvas

The windows would be boarded up by spruce and iron.

Your five-year-old niece would be your favorite guest playing princesses with you for hours while you both grin and giggle.

The numbers on the doorframe removed forcing visitors to second guess themselves upon arrival.

After she would leave, I would ask you why you asked me to stop the progress of our own little girl.

The shingles bright tangerine to distract from the scattered mix of trash and weeds growing between the cracks of the asphalt yard.

Your dresser topped with greasy cigarettes that you continuously place behind your ear, but rarely smoke.

In this house, there would be no books. Only music mostly 90s punk.

Your short, drunk, in-bred father would visit and punch holes in every wall.

Every beat-up cabinet and caved-in ceiling surfaced by funhouse mirrors that you would look at whenever you thought no one was looking at you.

You would never fill them. Simply nail another Goodwill painting of a clover over the spot and pray no one would find out what happened.

The writing would glean red on the walls, but no one would read it.

If the house ever burned, you would lock me inside with a toothpick to break my way out but I’d suffocate anyway.

Every drain, even the garbage disposal, clogged by your hair, the color and texture of dried wheat. Our bed sheets stained by blood and sweat remnants of our rough and dirty habits.

I said, “If I had a house and you lived in it.” What I meant to say was, “If you were a house.”

THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE DAY BY EMMA WATHEN

“

hat is that?” Cicada held the object under her grandmother’s nose. “A wheel.” Her grandmother, Natasi, tilted her head, giving the wooden contraption a cautious sniff. Cicada wouldn’t have been surprised if her grandmother tried to lick the thing next. “What is a wheel?” “I’m not really sure yet,” Cicada replied, “but I think it could be very useful. See how it rolls? Just imagine if we put four of these on a long board. If one of our kills were too heavy to carry, we could—” “This is not a wheel,” Natasi interrupted, taking the tree slice from Cicada and rubbing her fingers along its ridged edges. “This is a circle.” When Cicada had asked Leak what her face looked like, he said, “Like a circle.” Then she asked him what the sun looked like, and he squinted and, after a minute, started to cry. She hated that she hadn’t just punched him in the face like any of the other girls would have. “It looks like a circle, too,” he said, still not understanding. She put her hands on his cheeks and told him his face looked like a hollow tree trunk that sprouted uneven patches of moss nears its roots. When he smiled, she told him his face looked like a spider web swaying in the wind during a light afternoon shower. Then he kissed her, and she never did find out what her face looked like, besides a circle. Natasi’s face was not a circle. Back when she was born, it had been popular to wrap wet blankets around babies’ skulls to craft them into a conical shape, to bring them closer to the gods. Even though she was shorter than Cicada, the tip of her head always peaked above Cicada’s. That tip was beginning to look like a snow-capped mountain, with white roots springing up in the center, preparing for the avalanche down her skull. “It’s not just a circle, Grandmother,” Cicada said. “Maybe I should carve the middle out of it, so you can see better.” Natasi jerked the tree slice back. “No! You would destroy the circles.” “But it’s not a circle—” “Not the circle. The circles.” Natasi pointed to the thinnest tree ring on the wheel. “This is the year Eloxa put a piece of the sun on earth and

Betsy Osterberger Untitled Photography

Selia Salzsieder Strange Desires (Series) Paper collage

gave us fire.” She pointed to a thicker ring. “This is the year Dagmar tried to flood the earth with her tears. And this—” She pointed to a dark spot near the edge. “This is the year you were born, Cicada.” The year Cicada was born, the forest was beset by a hoard of insects that devastated the local flora. Most people waited for the apocalypse to come. But Natasi said the gods were looking after them. She collected the bugs’ carcasses and fried them in the fire, saving the tribe from starvation. It was a miracle, she claimed— and she had named Cicada after it. Sometimes, though, Cicada thought she had just been named after the pests. Their faces were sort of circular too. And ugly. “Why do you want to destroy our history?” Natasi asked, holding out the tree slice. “We live in a forest. I don’t think we’re in any danger of running out of trees.” The truth felt like a lie on her tongue, so Cicada kept talking, trying to push the feeling away. “But aren’t you afraid we’re going to run out of history? You’ve said it yourself, Grandmother. The tribe was twice as big when you were born.” “Then maybe you should focus on giving your son siblings instead of making wheels.” Natasi plucked a sliver out of her finger. “Do not try to be a god, Cicada. Mortals are not gods.” She cast her eyes down, a notso-subtle reminder that they were standing on the grave of Cicada’s mother. Her attempt to shame Cicada into submission was working. Then again, it was hard to be anywhere in their small village and not be standing on some ancestor’s grave. Their tribe had lived in this patch of forest since the beginning of time, always walking in the footprints of their ancestors. Walking, Cicada thought, not rolling. As Natasi walked away, Cicada knelt down and put her hand against the dirt floor. She tried to feel its history, as Natasi could. Instead, broken pebbles scratched

against her palm, deaf to her language. Her mother’s bones might as well have been buried leagues away instead of six feet below. When Cicada found Leak, he was peeing in a bush. He was also in the middle of a conversation with Monkey Face, who had a dead jaguar slung over her back. “Cicada!” Leak beamed when he spotted her. “Did you see what Face caught?” “For your son’s Naming Ceremony,” Monkey Face said, shifting the jaguar’s weight to her other shoulder. She would have had a much easier time carrying the animal, Cicada reflected, if she used a wheel. Said wooden contraption scratched against her own back, enclosed in the sack she often used to carry the baby. “Where is our son?” she asked Leak. Leak frowned, opened his mouth to call for him, then frowned again when no name came to him. “Son? Baby?” “If you weren’t already naming him tomorrow, I would,” Monkey Face said as the one- year-old crawled out from underneath the bush Leak had been peeing in. Her parents, too, had put off the Naming Ceremony. Which is how she’d ended up with the name Monkey Face. Monkey Face slunk away to parade her kill to the rest of the tribe as Leak scooped up his son. “What did you end up deciding on for his name?” Cicada was silent. “Come on. It’s not bad luck if you tell me!” In truth, she hadn’t picked a name yet. She had watched the sunset every day for a year, waiting for Eloxa to show her a miracle, something to name her son after. But the only miracle she found was the return of the buzzing insects. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. “Alright,” Leak relented, setting their son down. “We don’t want to spoil the surprise for the little man, do we?” He booped the baby’s nose,

sending the boy into a fit of giggles. Everyone called him Leak because when he was born, he peed on his mother, even before he cried. In fact, he had a habit of peeing everywhere, anytime, without regard to his surroundings. He peed while spearing a peccary. He peed while giving tribute to the Rain Goddess. He even peed on Cicada once during sex. She had a feeling that was when their son had been conceived. Cicada pulled the wheel out of her sack and held it out to Bug Eye (her nickname for the baby). The one-year-old grabbed the wheel with his mouth and started teething it. Leak watched the one-sided wrestling match with an open mouth that quivered up and down with Bug Eye’s movements. “Leak, what does that look like to you?” Cicada asked. She almost expected him to say, “Your face.” Instead, he said, “A miracle.” Her heart jumped. Did he see it too? That was why she fancied him after all, because he saw the world in a different way. Granted, that was mostly because of what he didn’t see, or didn’t understand, but there was brilliance in his simplicity. “Our little miracle,” Leak continued, smiling fondly as Bug Eye started straddling the wheel, still gripping it between his teeth. Her heart fell. “I was talking about the wh— the circle.” Leak tilted his head. “It looks like fun.” “It’s not supposed to be fun,” Cicada protested, although she fought a smile, imagining Leak rolling around in the grass with the wheel between his teeth. “It could have serious uses, if only Natasi would listen to me. I swear, she’s still suspicious of fire!” “Me too,” Leak said, scratching at his uneven stubble. Cicada sighed. “You ever wonder how babies got their names before the gods gave us fire? I mean, how could we perform the ritual without holding the baby over the fire?” Leak stared intently at a patch of grass, as if expecting it to burst

BUT THEN SHE HEARD A SOUND—A HARMONIC BUZZ, THE FIRST LULLABY SHE’D EVER HEARD. SHE LOOKED UP AS A HOARD OF INSECTS WHIZZED OVER HER HEAD. into flames. “The ritual changed,” she answered for him. “We changed. We took what the gods gave us and found our own uses for it. Spearhead used fire to give himself a brand. Do you think the gods told him to do that?” She shook her head. “I don’t see anything wrong with taking what we’re given and giving ourselves something new. I don’t need Bug Eye to live the same exact life I did.” “Bug Eye?” She blushed. “It’s what I’ve been calling the baby in my head.” “Bug Eye!” “I know; it’s a stupid name.” But Leak wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the viper sitting a foot away from Bug Eye. Cicada’s breath caught in her chest. She felt as if she were standing on top of a wheel that was slowly tipping forward, unable to move except to fall over the edge. She met Leak’s eyes and knew in that moment that they saw the

world the same way. She was Mother, and he was Father, and Bug Eye could have any name in the world, except Snake Food. Leak made the first move, darting in like a hawk and snatching Bug Eye from the ground. As he did, Cicada yanked the wheel out of Bug Eye’s gums and swung at the snake. The wheel collided with its target, sending the viper flying. When she looked down, she found two fangs sticking out of the wheel, ripped out of the viper’s mouth. An image flashed through her mind of spokes and an axel, quickly overpowered by the thought of fangs tearing through her baby’s skin. Behind her, Bug Eye was wailing. Heart pounding, Cicada rushed to examine him for any wounds. But no— he only wanted his toy back. “You’re right,” Leak said, never blinking as he watched Bug Eye squirm in his arms. “The circle does have serious uses.” He handed Bug Eye off to her and went behind the trees to pee. She knew then that the encounter would give him nightmares for weeks. Wandering so far from the settlement this close to nightfall was one way to get herself killed, but it was also the only way Cicada could come up with to think of a name for her son. If she returned the same place where she conceived her wheel, surely she could think of a worthy name for her son. Something better than Bug Eye. Better than Cicada. Eloxa had already begun to guide the sun underground by the time Cicada found the place again. Seated on the tree stump she had cut her wheel from, she could see the entire horizon, vaster than she remembered. As red turned to violet, she tried to count the number of tree stumps in the field but got lost somewhere in the two hundreds. No matter what Natasi said, Cicada knew the gods were guiding her invention of the wheel. Tree stumps didn’t just sprout out of the earth like this, rows of stubby knuckles

sliced identically. When she’d first seen the field, she thought it was a sign of the apocalypse. That in itself didn’t particularly scare her— the apocalypse had happened twice already, according to Natasi’s stories. What scared her was that it had happened without anyone knowing. It was like the proverb about the tree falling in the forest, only worse. These trees hadn’t fallen. They were just gone. And who knew if they made a sound? But then she had heard a sound— a harmonic buzz, the first lullaby she’d ever heard. She looked up as a hoard of insects whizzed over her head. Cicadas. Ugly black shells with a song from tone-deaf gods. They didn’t seem particularly miraculous. Until one flew into her mouth. She’d never tasted a cicada before— it felt too much like cannibalism, and even Natasi frowned upon that— but she’d imagined it plenty. She imagined it would be like the time Monkey Face had tricked Leak into drinking his own piss. Or the time Spearhead had tried to swallow fire. She never imagined it would taste so normal. Not good, but not bad either, like drinking rain, but with a crunch. For the first time, Cicada had felt like she understood why Natasi had chosen her name. Maybe she had been an ugly baby. Maybe she was an ugly adult, too. But maybe there was something more, something that took a special tongue or a special pair of eyes to see. When Cicada had looked back down at the tree stumps, she had seen her wheel for the first time. Not as a finished product, of course. To anyone else, it would have looked like a regular tree stump, a little on the mossy side, but nothing to sniff twice at. But for Cicada, it was as if the world had suddenly become round. And it would, she had thought, once the tribe saw how useful her wheel was. There would be more wheels on the ground than cicadas in the sky. She had, of course, forgotten that

all the cicadas would vanish from existence in a few short days. Sighing, Cicada now watched the rows of stumps vanish from view as darkness fell. She was no closer to a name for her son than she had been months ago. She wasn’t even sure she had come here looking for a name for him at all, unless Tree Stump was a viable candidate. No, she was still trying to make a name for herself, even when it had been decided long ago. She was about to leave when suddenly, the sun burst back into the sky. Only it wasn’t sunrise— there were no reds, or yellows, or blues coloring the sky. The moon still shone above, just starting its monthly blink. In fact, now that Cicada’s eyes had adjusted to the brightness, she realized that the new sun wasn’t in the sky at all but rather was hovering on the horizon, getting steadily larger. Moving towards her. She started running in its direction. As she got closer, she began to

hear it— no one had ever heard the sun before! Who would have guessed it sounded like crunched leaves and heavy panting? It would attract all sorts of creatures if it weren’t careful. Then again, who wouldn’t notice a sun in the middle of the night? Cicada stopped in her tracks. Surely she was foolish to think this miracle was intended only for her. Someone, or something, else was bound to notice. In fact, she could see now that she wasn’t alone. Just beyond the light, there was a shadowy figure who trailed behind the sun—no, who moved with it! Eloxa. Cicada ducked behind a bush, disbelieving her eyes. She had reason to. Eloxa’s head should have been conical, like Natasi’s, and her eyes should have been little suns. This shadow did not yet have eyes. The head, as far as Cicada could discern, was as circular as hers. Its skin was strange, or at least Cicada thought so until she realized that what she was looking at wasn’t its skin but

peculiar adornments that seemed to stifle the arms and legs. This shadow was not Eloxa. It was a man. And he was holding the sun in his hand. Cicada held her breath, not daring to make a sound. Not that the man could have heard anything over his own breathing. He seemed incapable of being stealthy. And yet he had stolen the sun. How? The cicadas were back, buzzing above her. Their lullaby was different this time, accompanied by a strange echo, sort of like a hiss. Like a viper. Before Cicada could register what was happening, the stolen sun’s beams pierced her face. The man cried out, dropping his sun. At his feet, the viper sunk its fangs into his ankle, avenging its crushed tail. Cicada paid it no attention. She was too busy racing for the sun, praying that she could grab it before it set the earth on fire, praying that she wouldn’t be the kindle to its flame.

Betsy Osterberger Don’t Go Photography

Her fingers tightened around it, and she felt a sudden jolt. It was… cold. Smooth and cold and not circular at all. A cylinder that caged a speck of the sun within. Cicada stared into it, like she had told Leak to, but it didn’t make her cry. She had the feeling it should have. Just like the man writhing in pain beside her should have. But it didn’t. Her fingers found a switch on the side and flipped it. She almost dropped the device when the sun flickered out. Comprehension dawning, she flipped the switch again. The sun turned on. Off, on. Night, day. She made a year go by in minutes. Maybe the dying man’s life flashed before his eyes as well. It didn’t matter. Mortals are not gods, Natasi had said. This man was no god. And he hadn’t stolen the sun, either. Once she was sure the stranger was dead, she retraced his steps. She didn’t need his “sun” to show her the way. The man’s careless

trampling had left clear tracks, even in the dark. The stumps, too, were one of his tracks, she realized when she entered a nearby clearing. The vanished tree trunks sat in neat stacks, stripped of their bark. Sitting by them was a huge contraption, made of the same material as the false “sun.” When Cicada turned the light on to get a better look, she froze. Then turned the light off. It was her wheel. Not her wheel, exactly— it was bigger and smoother with identical ridges on the edge and little holes on the inside. In fact, it wasn’t her wheel at all. It never had been. Just someone else’s dream, from many suns ago. Who was to say the real sun was even a sun at all, and not another of the man’s inventions? Maybe he had built the light in his hands, and sent it to the sky, long before Eloxa had given birth to the day. Eloxa. Perhaps the only thing the

tribe had ever actually invented. Cicada pounded her hand against the stranger’s wheel and, for the first time, she thought she could feel its history. Daybreak was coming soon, for real this time. Cicada used the dead man’s arm, slung over her shoulder, to wipe the sweat off her brow. She didn’t think a wheel would have made this journey any easier. She’d already divested the man of all his clothes, anything that could indicate he wasn’t from a neighboring tribe in case the body was discovered. It was true, of course— he was from a neighboring tribe. Without his clothes, the stranger didn’t look any different than the tribesmen, save for some strange marks on his chest surrounding an image of a red parrot. She didn’t have time to ponder their meaning as she dumped his body on the ground and started digging. Her fingers raked up clots of dirt, but

Betsy Osterberger Untitled Photography

she didn’t bother trying to feel the history underneath. From its perch on a tree stump, the man’s light guided her hands, motivating her to go faster. There was a choked gasp behind her. In a smooth motion, Cicada grabbed the light from the stump and aimed it at the intruder, afraid of what she would find. It was Natasi. Cicada froze, unable to lower the light. Its bright hue made Natasi’s skin look shades paler. At least, Cicada hoped it was the light. Natasi had always been old, but not frailold, old as in full of more life than everyone else. More life than the stranger lying at her feet. His light didn’t show that. It saw the world in a different way. “Cicada,” Natasi whispered. “What have you done?” She was not staring at the body but at the light shining in Cicada’s hands. Cicada swallowed and thought of the bug from earlier. Her namesake. She knew what to do. “This man stole the sun,” she said, matching the tone Natasi took when telling one of her stories. “I need to go return it to the sky before the moon is gone. Do you understand?” Natasi’s head bobbed up and down, although Cicada couldn’t tell if it was a tremble or a nod. “He needs to be returned to the gods,” Cicada continued. “Would you do it, Grandmother? Could you bury him?” Natasi took a cautious step forward, avoiding the beam of the light. Cicada held her breath. She could see the first hints of blue on the horizon. If she didn’t leave soon, the sun would rise, and her ruse would be up. The tribe would be faced with the truth she now knew— if they didn’t accuse her of trying to be a god. “You saved the day,” Natasi whispered, a smile breaking over her face. Cicada lowered the light so Natasi wouldn’t see her frown. True, this man could no longer turn their village into tree stumps. She had saved

the day. But what about the week, the month, the year? Then Cicada realized Natasi meant the sun. “Yes,” Cicada repeated. “I saved the day.” As the sun set the next day, Cicada found Leak stabbing her wheel with a spearhead. She grabbed his wrist. “What are you doing?” “I’m making history,” he said. “What do you mean?” She thought of the holes in the stranger’s wheels. Had Leak followed her tracks and found the man’s camp? Did he know what it meant? If he had, he hadn’t understood, because he was smiling. “Natasi says the trees tell us stories,” he said. “So I’m making this one tell your story.” He held up the wheel to show her his masterpiece. Etched on the edge, near the two viper fangs, was a circle with two triangles. It reminded her of the marks on the dead man’s chest. Even then, it took her a moment to realize what the etching was supposed to be. “A cicada.” She’d been right about Leak. There was brilliance in his simplicity. Cicada laughed. “This is why you pee all the time, isn’t it? To make your mark.” He stared at her blankly. She took the wheel from his hand. “We don’t need this story. I already know where it leads.” Glancing over at where Natasi was preparing the fire for the Naming Ceremony, she found another use for the wheel: it was excellent kindle. The smoke it produced looked no different than the rest of the wood. “Now it can help us build a new future,” she told Leak, grasping his hand as the tribe started to gather around. “Like it did yesterday.” Leak squeezed her hand, his spider web smile flickering with the flames. She never wanted to see that smile under the beams of the stranger’s light. Natasi held their son over the fire. “What is this child’s name?” Cicada stared into the baby’s bug eyes and found his name. “Wheel.” l

WHO WAS TO SAY THE REAL SUN WAS EVEN A SUN AT ALL, AND NOT ANOTHER OF THE MAN’S INVENTIONS? MAYBE HE HAD BUILT THE LIGHT IN HIS HANDS, AND SENT IT TO THE SKY, LONG BEFORE ELOXA HAD GIVEN BIRTH TO THE DAY. 85

Lana Scholtz Generation X Watercolor and ink

SOME MEANS TO AN END BY ALEX VAN BUSKIRK

rantically scribbling bad ideas in the passive voice, outside it’s raining cold. Inspiration comes in the saving grace of a slap to the face; reality stings. Light disrupts. Being is just aggravating. Years might unfurl like measuring tape in maturity, but if learning to love yourself is all I can expect at twenty-eight I’d rather just remain cold—frozen and struggling in order to write the wintriest of psalms, Genesis to my Gender. I’d rather break teeth over a gravelly drunken cadence, murmuring nonsense rants at select crowds—“How poetic,” they decide, as I throw up onstage into a wastebasket that’s an all-too-easy metaphor for my profound life. Either that or an old-timey pirate, the few remaining noble professions. Perhaps my trajectory will rotate just enough in a drunken orbit to align with the rest of my run-away mind, and Real Life will turn slightly less insufferably. I save up funds for a solid American car—or maybe an intimidating Harley—and set my compass westward. Perhaps even invent a few sentences on the way. Meet likeminded delusionals with big ambition and imaginary work ethic—my kind of deviants. Travel in packs in search of only more pavement to tread, more stories to share, more strangers to forget, more cities to burn. Trail blazers, aesthetically speaking. Domesticity lurks above like ornery vultures deeply scanning the arroyo, and I can feel the heat of a naked sun urging me to quit. The trail blazers I came here with long gone, scattered to all corners by the selfish wind—they have sealed their manifest destinies, cooled their arrogant white flames. I’m about running on empty in absolutely every sense of the word. Are there multiple senses? I’m too fatigued and wired. Does anything make sense? Is sense sensible? I tread again, this time along the crossrivers of an old miner’s town, asking for sense. With the small gains I’ve finagled, I buy a one-trip ticket home, but the driver tells me I’ve never actually left. He reminds me of an authority figure, his stern frown comforts me. I simply ask him to keep to the course, and we spend Eternity driving in circles and circles and circles and circles and circles and circles.

“SOME MEANS TO AN END” IS THE WINNER OF THE ILLUMINATION JOURNAL AND UW FLASH FICTION SPRING WRITING CONTEST.

Final Thoughts

THANK YOU to all of the professors, teaching assistants, advisors, and professional staff members that have supported all of us during our time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our success as students is dependent on the dedicated talent of many employees of the university that inspire us with new ideas and encourage us to develop our own. This publication is made possible through the generous support of the Wisconsin Union and University Marketing. Thank you to both of these organizations for helping Illumination share undergraduate work on campus, and providing us with valuable assistance and encouragement. Thank you to Stephanie Webendorfer, Jen Farley, Jenny Klaila, Alice Walker-Lampani, Kelli Hughes, Karen Redfield, Kate Lochner, Heather Good, and Anais Reyes. Your guidance has meant much to all of us.

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