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opportunities + community events

sparkle + blink 105
© 2020 Quiet Lightning

cover art © Livien Yin

livienyin.com

“Big Wheel” by Jon Bennett first appeared in Punk Noir Magazine.

“The Invisible Hand Knocks Twice” by Benjamin Gucciardi
first appeared in AGNI.
set in Absara

Promotional rights only.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form

without permission from individual authors.

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Your support is crucial and appreciated.

quietlightning.org
su bmit @ qui e tl i g h tn i n g . o r g
 Contents
curated by
Katie Tandy & Lauren Rosenfield
featured artist
Livien Yin | livienyin.com

Ronny Kerr Beforetimes 1

Joe Donohoe Urban Angst 3
Keith Mark Gaboury Skull Walk 7
Jon Bennett Coyote 9
Cynthia Darling New Elvis 11
Leigh Lucas Wedding Poem 15
Nick Martino Marrying 19
Sage Curtis Manifesting A Mansion 21
Diana Donovan Another Country 23
goldfinch 25
Daniel Lucas Low Land Burials 27
Danielle Bero Corona, Queens
with a lime and isolation 39
Allison Landa On Lockdown 41
Minna Dubin Iloveyoudontdie 45
Jon Bennett Big Wheel 49
Leigh Lucas Art Monster 51
Robyn Carter Excelsior 53
Danielle Bero Word 57
Benjamin Gucciardi The Invisible Hand Knocks Twice 59
 g is sponsor
et Lightnin ed b
Qu i y
 Quiet Lightning
A 501(c)3, the primary objective and purpose of Quiet
Lightning is to foster a community based on literary
expression and to provide an arena for said expression. QL
produces a bimonthly, submission-based reading series on
the first Monday of every other month, of which these
books (sparkle + blink) are verbatim transcripts.

Formed as a nonprofit in July 2011, the QL board is currently:

Evan Karp executive director

Chris Cole managing director
Meghan Thornton treasurer
Kelsey Schimmelman secretary
Christine No producer
Lisa Church curator liaison
Connie Zheng art director
Edmund Zagorin disruptor
Katie Tandy disruptor
Hadas Goshen disruptor
Sophia Passin disruptor

If you live in the Bay Area and are interested in

helping—on any level—please send us a line:

e v an @ qui et light nin g . o rg

 help us invest in a sustainable
e t hi c a l a r t s ecos ys t em

Support us on Patreon
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t h a n k y o u t o o u r pat r o n s

yvonne campbell karen penley

sage curtis monica rocha
linette escobar jessie scrimager
chrissie karp jon siegel
miles karp katie tandy
ronny kerr meghan thornton
charles kruger emily wolahan
jennifew lewis edmund zagorin
shannon may connie zheng
 y Kerr
Ronn

B e f o r e ti m e s

you land somewhere in the vast, ambiguous perimeter,

and crawl to the center. you are poised between
seasons. between work and play. gate and car, car
and door, door and room, room and street, street and
subway, subway and tacos, tacos and doom.

you sip black liquid under dead roses as the unsmiling

man on stage deafens you with his bleak craft. this is
noise.

you turn the dial. in the chianti-colored basement, a

jazzman raps the keys the way he has for a century,
while his heirs sit in shadow shivering with ecstasy.
this is sex. this is money. in the morning,

you and the creatives circle the 40th-floor fish bowl,

seeking a novel view, finding only the fog of war. you
breathe indoor plants. the gardeners seem peaceful,
perhaps well-paid. the plants could survive a crash of
climate, but not of market. tomorrow, it will be 40
degrees colder. today,

you eat a grease-drenched slice of pizza bigger

than your face. you eat four. same tomorrow. the
more grease you eat, the more wine you drink,
the more noise you hear. every day is new music

1
friday. a golden idol hangs serene behind a neglected
harpsichord. on the floor, four radiant girls shake their
tresses in wild dance. this is sex.

spanish, turkish, lebanese, italian, irish, trinidadian...

pretty people everywhere. they work. they stay at
home. they strike out for the villages in search of
sex. they find noise. they spend money. they find
heartbreak, eyes sad and full of blame for no one. they
leave, looking for what.

you pick up the pace, eager to escape the rancid smells

of the underground. this place wants to test your
knowledge. this place wants you to feel special. this
place wants you to feel nostalgic. this place demands
you take a shot. this place wants you to sing, but when
you stop nobody enjoys the silence. this is noise.

you join the rockstars in their fancy hotel room and

eat all their drugs. they celebrate you with promoted
posts. this is money. with no followings to speak of,
three brothers slap each other on the backs, reassuring
themselves they exist.

you dream, reaching out to some lost lover. this is sex.

you try to swim through 300 million images but there
is nowhere to go.

meanwhile, masked death stalks the city unseen.

2 R on n y K e rr
 Donohoe
Joe

U r ba n A n g st

The City from space

During the day
Looks like a skeletal hand
Raw bone burnt
Into the surrounding sere
Grass hills
Like BB King
The thrill is gone
Granite grey
I like the fog
Which has different colors
I don’t know
If everything is less hardcore
Seems that way
Used to be drive bys
With AK-47’s
I didn’t know the score
Of universal expendability
The smiling innocents
Laughing outside
Like nothing bad
Ever happened to them
The world burning
But in America
They don’t care
Unless it’s packaged right

3
 Big guys without troubles
And women who smile
Like telecasters
Waiting for a vice
To take them
And if they survive
The plunge into the dark
Maybe a memoir
And maybe a film
Or maybe some people
Are just better actors
Maybe the vapidly happy
Are screaming inside
And the morose and morbid
The brooding and somber
Are laughing off their ass inwardly
And maybe the serious are shallow
Urban angst
Used to have a soundtrack
Now it’s all quiet
Except for the conversations
That don’t matter
A coyote sits like a dog
At night in the avenues
Loping over the bridge
From the headlands
In the middle of the night
Untamed noses
Following the scent of Szechuan oils
Coating roasting meat
And dumpsters full of delight
And domestic animals
That are always fun for them
I’ve seen coyotes up close

4 J o e Do n oh o e
 Wild ones and brazen
Ears flicking like antenna
I’m hoping the coyotes win
But they probably won’t
I’m hoping the ocean will last
And it may.

Joe Donoh oe 5
 h Mark Gabo
ur
K eit y
Skull Walk

Coyote shambles north along San Pablo Ave. At West

MacArthur Boulevard, he trips over a skull. “Oakland,
what is this white sphere my paw crushed a hole
through?” “This contained the brain of a homeless
citizen.” “Did this citizen die on your concrete skin?”
“Yes, she did.” “Well, I wish to become her. I’m done
being me.” Coyote slips the skull onto his head and
blindly stumbles through north Oakland. At 45th
Street, he smacks into a streetpole. “Streetpole, what
kind of streetpole are you?” “I hold the memory
of a lost dog taped to my metal body. Are you a lost
dog?” “No, I’m a lost coyote.” Coyote walks on past a
hair salon spitting out through their door beautiful
hair propped on top of skin / blood bags. When a
woman fresh from the salon waits at the 48th Street
intersection, the skull slams into her hairsprayed hair.
“Hair, what kind of hair are you?” Coyote asks. “My
hair doesn’t have a mouth. Speak to me,” the woman
says. “What kind of hair do you own?” “The-don’t-
fuck-with-me-kinda-hair.” Coyote nods. Or really the
skull nods. At 50th Street, he breathes a bone breath
when he turns to a bank manager pounding on glass
to drive his loitering skull away. Coyote feels his
fur for the last smoke he tucked somewhere within.
As he strikes a match, a policeman tackles him to
the ground. “Policeman, what kind of policeman

7
are you?” “A policeman with a gun. Are you carrying a
gun?” “No. Hey Oakland, do you have a gun? Will you
defend me?” “I don’t defend the powerless.”

8 K e i t h Ma rk G ab ou ry
 Bennett
Jon

C oy ote

I was down by the water

and I heard L screaming
A coyote was running away from her
along the cliffs
“My damn foot!” she said
She had a big bite mark
5 or 6 puncture wounds
Someone offered her a bandaid
and I called the ranger
as we started toward the parking lot
There were a lot of people
on the trail
a lot of horse shit
a lot of trash, and pet dogs
but not many other animals
only a few crows
and somewhere, howling,
the last coyote.

9
 a Darli
nthi ng
Cy

New Elvis

For weeks after, people talked about The Little Blue

Suede Shoes Chapel and the kidnapping of Bart the
Elvis Impersonator. Many thought it all really started
the moment Susie hired Bart The Elvis Impersonator
at her little chapel, The Little Blue Suede Shoes Chapel,
where, up until Bart’s hiring, only midgets had worked
as the officiants. Having a Little Elvis to officiate one’s
wedding was, well, the prime draw for most people
who came to the chapel, and as such, Susie might have
done well to simply close the chapel for the days that
any of her true Little Elvises couldn’t show up. But
instead, she, as she sometimes did, exercised a certain
amount of denial, and hired Bart, the non-midget Elvis,
to work the day that Gary, her previously scheduled
Little Elvis, didn’t show up for work.

And so, upon the arrival of planning-to-be-married

couple Jeanine and Jason, straight down from Denver,
CO, there was immediate hell to pay. Susie tried to
stave it off. She welcomed Jeanine and Jason and
oohed and ahhed over Jeanine’s cute little light-blue
mini-dress. Then, before the bride-to-be could look
around for her expected Little Elvis, Susie whisked
Jason and Jeanine into the dressing room, giving
them a few winks in telling them not to delay, as
their wedding would start in five minutes.

11
Jeanine wasted no time admiring herself in the mirror.
She stretched her long arms above her head and cocked
her head to the side, smiling seductively into the mirror.
Jason stood back to the side and admired her too, until
he couldn’t help himself and grabbed her around the
waist to give her a long kiss, telling her, upon breaking
their romantic lip lock, that this would be their last
kiss as single people. Jeanine felt a lightening of the
tension in her neck as he said this. Newly divorced,
she’d feared, even as recently as five months ago, that
she would be an unwed mother of three for the rest of
her life. But then Jason had appeared, seemingly out of
nowhere. And, soon enough, she’d concocted the idea
to give her ex-husband full custody of her children and
get married to Jason. Her new life was about to start.
Jason had picked this Little Blue Suede Shoes Chapel
as a launching point for their new fun and young
coupledom. Kids aside. Ex-husbands and ex-wives
aside. Only fun. Fun fun fun. As long as nothing got in
the way of it. Sometimes it was true that Jeanine felt
herself trying a bit too hard, as if she were clenching
her fists in her attempts to have fun. But then she’d
look at what her life could have been: alone, with her
three boys and their mounting piles of laundry and her
bills and her lonely nights without anyone. And she
knew that if she were to start again, she would have to
clench her fists, a bit.

Susie the wedding chapel owner didn’t know any of

this about Jeanine. And so, as Susie, dressed in her tan
short shorts and madras halter top, walked up to tell
Jeanine that today her ceremony would be officiated
by Bart, this tall Elvis, Susie had no idea that Jeanine’s
vision of the-way-this-wedding-was-supposed-to-

12 C yn t h i a Da r l i n g
go-down-because-this-was-the-way-her-future-was-
supposed-to-start would be shattered. Bart stood
idly. He ran a hand through his wave of gelled Elvis
hair. He was hung over and the pleather body suit he
was wearing didn’t let his body breathe, so sweat was
pouring down his back. He’d responded to Susie’s call
only because he could use an extra few hours. And she
had a full roster of couples scheduled for the day. Only
Bart knew that Gary was not showing up to work that
day or any other day. For Bart had heard that Gary
had run off to LA with a stripper he’d taken home last
night. And, if Bart knew Gary, the relationship with
the stripper might not last, but Gary’s resolve to make
it to LA might. So, Gary wasn’t coming back. And Bart
was here to fill in. And in the mean-time, Bart just
wanted to get the day started and over with.

Suddenly, Jeanine allowed Susie’s words about the

missing Little Elvis to sink in. There would be no
Little Elvis. Susie kept repeating that the chapel would
comp them photos. They’d offer free photos and the
ceremony with Bart would be great. Jeanine only
heard noise. She grabbed Bart’s hand and then grabbed
Jason’s hand, and she ran up the aisle toward the door.
Suddenly, with the force of voice that Bart hadn’t
heard since his own grandmother used to tell him to
clean his room, Jeanine yelled that she and Jason were
getting married for free in the parking lot, and Bart
was going to do it, or else.

Susie stared as the threesome rushed out the chapel

door and into the sunshine. From behind her, the sound
of sweeping from the new chore boy she’d just hired
calmed her nerves for just a moment. She took out her

Cynt h i a Da rli ng 13
list of weddings for the day. This one was a wash. She
drew a line through the couple’s name. She hoped Bart
would return after he wed the couple for free out in
the parking lot. She had nine more ceremonies to go.
But, as she approached the door of the chapel to look
outside, she put a hand to her mouth as she saw the
bride and groom shove Bart into their silver Subaru
and then speed off down the road.

Susie turned back to the chore boy. He was all she had
now. He might look good in an Elvis suit. She could
pay him Bart’s wages. Or, part of them, at least. These
weddings wouldn’t be legal without a real officiant.
For that, she’d have to do the honors. The new chore
boy Elvis could stand beside her while she married the
rest of her nine couples that day.

As she approached the boy sweeping, he looked up.

He noticed Susie was smiling in a way he hadn’t seen
before. She took him by the arm and steered him to the
employee dressing room, where she instructed him to
find the Elvis body suit that fit him best. He couldn’t
believe his luck. In Vegas, anything could happen.

14 C yn t h i a Da r l i n g
 h Lucas
Leig

Wedding Poem

We live in a world of airplanes and popsicles,

New car smell and new baby smell
And pink! what a perfect and ridiculous color.
There are dramatic bouquets
And red velvet cakes,
Bounties of beautiful things.
But also alarm clocks and allergic reactions
And new little collections of fat sprouting up
In the most unexpected places.
But it’s worse than that too.
There is senseless suffering and loss
And bad things happening to good people.
So it’s a choice you see, to make sense of it.
Or rather, to allow the good and little things
in your life
Become the big things,
Or rather, to let love in.

15
 See the thing is,
If you watch the spaces in between,
There life goes—see it?—rhinestoning around
In a blue crushed velvet suit
All big bottomed and amazing.
In these moments the angels take a break
From washing dishes and croquet
To look down and watch it parade.
Oh glory they say.

Like a day like this one

Is certainly one for which
The angels have stopped to watch.
They’re up there holding hands in a long unbroken
angel line,
Oh glory they’re saying
And they’re weeping a little (happy tears) and
sometimes
They sneeze and the dust floats down
And gets in our eyes
But funny enough it helps us see better
Because while no one’s future is certain,
While sometimes chaos seems to rule,
Today we bear witness to two little lives becoming
big ones,

16 L e i g h L uc as
Two who choose faith over doubt,
Or rather, realize the pillar of faith is doubt,
Or rather, who know that life will be hard and fast
and filled
Sometimes with pain
But there is nothing they won’t want to face down
together
As a team of two
Plus an army of hundreds of angels.

Le i gh Lu cas 17
 k Martino
Nic

M a r r y in g

We used to call it marrying

if one swing’s arc matched the arc of another.
Whenever I married the kid beside me,
the both of us equal in our limit, the both of us
riding towards a common source,
that intimacy frightened me. The very power
of communion lay in the self-effacing
magic of chance. I was like
a walled garden, waiting for the moment when
the heavy would take me (and me alone) hold again.

Now I run in order to feel lighter,

carrying through the house of October
a November sky of wild, itinerant blue
like a flag, a single hitch in being between
me and the runner up ahead. Together we glide,
moon and the driver’s-side window. I keep distance
between us
the same way I used to keep bees—
makeshift house out back, every week
donning the white gloves, the wiry veil
of hat like a welder’s habit, tending to a kinetic shape
emerging, an un of us, the work so narcotizing
the knowing only comes days later:
our thirst was the same.

19
 Curtis
Sage
M a n if e
stin g A M a n si o n

Tonight, we dream this house our own—

fill the plaster walls with the scent
of future years. It’ll be easy, I say,
Knock this wall down. Build a staircase,
You add the guard rail, mentally rip
out the tile. We’ve already hung
the art on the hooks and wire,
fucked against the kitchen cabinets,
let the yellow paint bleed into the marrow
of us. Sip on beer and run the numbers.
I draw plans in a small notebook,
reserved for daydreamed blue prints.
I water the pears.

What I mean to say is, I’ve moved

in and still want more. A permission
to draw the years into the door frame,
to never worry about the scratches
on the hardwood because I put them there
and they are mine.

21
 na Donovan
Dia
A n o ther C o un tr y

All things considered, going to Europe wasn’t her

worst idea
leaving the girls with their father and stepmother
saying she needed to clear her head, get back to
painting

everyone would agree it was time she got sober

and there was that place in Rome where she could
dry out
an old monastery—the Innocents—she’d have plenty
of privacy

and newborn babies are abandoned every day

so it wouldn’t be out of the question to find one on
the Spanish Steps
a boy wrapped in blankets—she’d bring him home in
the spring

Girls, meet your brother, Antonio, she’d say

named for St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things
of which there were so many in the world—
especially her

23
 she couldn’t marry the guitar teacher just because he
was the father
he was a musician, too young, and moody
she’d mistaken his unhappiness for artistic genius

anyway, she was forty-one and didn’t want to

embarrass the girls
whose mom got pregnant at this age? no, it would
never work
why did everyone need to know her secrets?

in Europe, she could board a train in one country and

wake up in another
never have to tell this handsome near-stranger what
they’d set in motion
that afternoon—one body reaching blindly for
another

24 Di an a Do n ovan
 GOLDFINCH
One morning, I heard an unmistakable crack on the
sliding glass door
looked over to a flurry of feathers falling in the
sunlight
and lying still on the ground—a tiny bird, a goldfinch.

Rushing to open the door, I lifted the limp body into

my hands
its eyes wide, its beak half-open, a delicate creature
feathers so vibrant—who wouldn’t wish to spare its
life?

Murmuring words of encouragement (since forgotten)

I made a nest from a cardboard box and scattered it
with grass and leaves
then laid the bird gently down, praying to the God of
Broken Things.

I kept silent watch, snapped alert by a flash of yellow

and black
as it took flight, landing on a branch of the plum
tree—eying me
Di ana Donovan 25
 and, of course, I took it as an omen—a second
chance—I wanted to call you

to say maybe it wasn’t hopeless after all—a trick of

light, a near miss
a burst of color and one thing becomes another—but
it was the summer of tears
and you’d been gone a while, so kept it to myself,
thought hard about healing.

26 Di an a Do n ovan
 iel Lucas
Dan

L o w Land Burials

Sometimes I can smell you

on a pillow in a city you don’t know
on a train, a kiosk, on the collar of my jacket.
All the places you’ve been, or not.
It’s hard to know with you.
You, so slippery - and porous.

What if I did a backflip?

Stopped drinking entirely? Took a liquid strike?
Would you come find me?
If I took a vow of silence?
Or of never smelling again?
(Funny how there’s no word for that.
I guess we really are powerless against it.)

So instead I get nauseous on the train,

This shadow and her stench.

The funny thing about loss is the inflection point.

Where you have lost longer than you had.

Or a trailing off; missing the train; this intense

deja vu; a lack of certainty.

27
When you aren’t even sure if you ever did wake up
next to them. Did you ever kiss? Did you love them?
Do you now? From the other side of the river styx?
Deep in the belly of the beast? Are you still covered
in their loose hairs? Their sweat and saliva?

Has it dried up? Evaporated by so many moons?

Am I missing,
Or am I waiting?

Are you kissing me at stop signs?

Have we fucked for the last time,
Unwittingly?

It was your birthday the other day.

Soon it will be mine too.
It will be your birthday again, soon.
And this is the only place to say it.
The only way to hear it.
Or read it, I suppose.
Whatever, you get my point.

You always did.

Maybe you still do.
Who’s to say?

28 Dan i e l L uc as
I’m still hung up on your birthday.
How I can’t call. Say hello.
The words exist, but not the space.
Who would bear witness? Or the burden?

There are no wires, postal codes, carrier pigeons,

smoke signals, postcards, whatsapps, no inks, binary
codes, morse codes, no pathogen, or virus, no super
deep space probe, or satellite.
Just an endless horizon.
Flickering. Maybe.

Somewhere in the distance

I gesture vaguely.
I try to untangle myself from myself.
Like a stumble, like I always stumble.

My friends say it’s how they know it’s a party.

You’re still worming around in there

Between rocks and the bramble.
A rock and a crunchy place.
That’s where you’ll find me.
Not that you’re looking.

Dani e l Lu cas 29
I liked it when you pressed up against me.
Let me hold you, after a long day.
Full, and leaking.
You’d found me, in hopes of something,
something we should probably talk about.
But later.
Always later.

You were always too full, and sinewy.

too full of bone, rearranging yourself,
Always moving.
Always moving.

But where did you go?

Can I sing to you? Send you a song on a Tuesday?
Can I write you a poem? Again?

I’m making in-roads

In the low-lands
Where the stairs are steep
And everyone is a polyglot
Except you.
Well, except me too, but that’s beside the point.

The last moment usually happens and you don’t even

know it.
A final reckoning, unreckoned with.
Just as potent as everything else, but empty in a way
you’ll soon recognize.

30 Dan i e l L uc as
Like my bad poetry,
Spoiling as it hits the page.
Rotted to the core by the time I get back from this
fantasy.
Dead by the time I leave this cafe, inside the museum.
These pages drunk on condensed water, and chilly
winds rolling across my back as feet shuffle in and
out.

More pathetic by the minute.

Do you still have too many TV’s?

The ones you never used,
Cheap decorations of the life you’re trying
so hard to make?

Is your freezer still full?

Your spice rack sliding down?
Still perennially late?

What did you think about out on that balcony, cold

and windy, after I came clean?
Did you strategize? Again?

The secret is we are all holding each other defined by

our loves,
constructed.
The secret is how we all lose our shape
become untangled, loose in the waves.
Loose, loss, lost.

Dani e l Lu cas 31
The last way to connect
through the lost and the loss.
Where I still find you
shaping the caverns,
the mine shafts and deep passages
networks of connection created through negative space.
Lost space.

How you find your self in the dark;

How you define and value the space inside you:
Solid or not.

Now the words just float around in my head,

Now that you’ve left,
Now I haven’t spoken to anyone all day.
Except the waiters,
and gallery-sitters.

Now that you’ve left.

Now there are no rebounds, or
boundary crossings that define my shape.

So I become like water,

since I can.

“Therapy without the therapist”

Or the story of your uselessness
in a land before time, or where it’s been forgotten.
Please don’t take my words to heart.
I’ll always love you.

32 Dan i e l L uc as
Still find a place for you.
Rearrange the furniture like my grand-aunt did.
But with considerably less smoke.
No choking this time.

I just needed to smash a few plates, open the walls,

spray the mold, freeze dry it all
and close the book.
Or, choose to close it.

Sky burials seem nice.

A gentle mist, dissipated,
Like when I was a child and finally understood
the importance of the defroster.
The importance of a soft melody, and softer voices.
The importance of you and me,
all of our nights together, and apart.

How much I asked you to sacrifice

even as I stood empty handed at your parents’ door
that first time.
How your father worried but loved me instantly.

I want to be that mist again.

Elusive as always, but with fewer demands.
A soft enveloping, wet on your skin
as you get lost.
With me, again.

Dani e l Lu cas 33
You can keep my words.
Even hidden in a drawer.
They are yours.

As above, so below.
But that’s rarely the case.

Where did your body go, my dear friend?

We scoured for innovative plans,
forgetting that you too had a family.
Something so remote, a feeling of betrayal as I sat in
the front row.
Blurting out obscenities as the preacher spoke,
backgrounded by a piano so lush.

Where did your body go, my brother?

So I may find you and weep.

I wrote this for you.

But we all know it’s really for me.
Another selfish gesture,
a groping, abusive and hostile.
Maybe the words are too ugly,
maybe you won’t care.
There’s really just no way to know.

Like when you got so drunk

You cried in my lap.
Argued, and screamed.

34 Dan i e l L uc as
When you said you loved me
completely and could we please just
Fuck?

Your distance moving faster than a hoard of locusts,

The size of Texas.

Did you watch my knees buckle

as he told me about you?
In Sedona, in November, in the sunshine.
To this day it makes me weep.
10 hours of abject nothing as we drove home.
As I had to pass on the news.
Not even a chance to laugh with infinity.
Nothing but nothing.

Thirty-four A.
Same seat there and back,
somehow. I’m sure I planned it.
I just don’t remember.

Never the same river.

Never the same seat.

Cleansed by a bridge being raised, or a bloodletting.

A twist to relieve this pinch,
The space where I felt you,
and now no longer do.
A memory trapped in my body,
cleansed by a bloodletting.

Dani e l Lu cas 35
I hope there is happiness at your door,
And a baby for you soon, out of the dark;
And a soft release, like that crushed velvet and your
pup;
And a body to take you to Mars;
And empathy as you grieve;
And the empty man who loves games, and has the
same schedule;
And security with the boy you soothe;
And a home for your babies not built on sand in the
flat lands;
And clarity for you who still lurks in the gloomy trees;
And ease in your bones high in the clouds;
And a hand on the small of your back as we wait in
line;
And a deep breath.

And this is what I am left with:

Prayers and manifestations,
glimpses, ghosts, and attempts at conversation.

Like water, over rocks, under roots, and through

caverns.
Flowing, flowing, always.

You can always touch it,

but never hold.

36 Dan i e l L uc as
It is far too smooth,
like wet, too silky and porous.
Yet you will try -
because it feels so good.

Or, at least, it feels.

Dani e l Lu cas 37
 ielle Bero
Dan

withCorona, Queenstion
a l i m e a n d is o l a

on the outskirts of East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights

McDonalds and churro street carts
scented with tortilla
punctuated with calloused hands

bars with no windows

serving Mexican beers
and a bowl of nuts or pretzels

dipping hands in shared spaces

spreading the virus in community

burying bodies of babies and ancestors alike

reading eulogies in succession
like radio play

we all sword fight in the alleys at night

and take bites of cobbed corn in the morning
holding butter and saliva in our hands

dapping and patting in each greeting

to keep the disease alive.

39
 ison Landa
All

O n Lockdow n

This story is about the back of a door. I don’t usually

see the back of the door. The door is usually open
and so I see what the door can keep me from: houses,
street, people. I leave the door open because I can’t
stand the disconnect between myself and life, even
when I am in my own home with its own distractions.

Enter the new buzzwords: social distancing, self-

quarantining, flattening the curve. They racket
around my brain like the fly that likes our compost. I
hate the compost, for the record. I would never do it.
It was never my idea. It was his idea, and he presses it
upon me like an eager Mormon at an eternally closed
door.

Today that door—ivory-colored, scratched at the

bottom from our dogs’ deadly ministrations—
features a few bags hanging from its knob. Shopping
is one of the few reasons we are allowed outside
our homes. Not shopping for fun, either. None of
this leisurely browsing amongst books, considering
secondhand clothes at a thrift store. We’re talking
standing in line outside Trader Joe’s, waiting
our turn to walk in and check out empty shelves.
What’s the least favorite Trader Joe’s item, TJs
Sashimi? Even that is picked clean. I’m lucky to

41
 walk out with milk, rice cakes, peanut butter, and
some Joe’s O’s to keep me company on the ride home.

Oh, I’m stress-eating. You’d better believe it. That

packet of cookies isn’t going to last until the next
sunrise. He keeps telling me to ration myself, to buy
smaller packages, I have a tiny stomach—surgery five
years ago now—and it can’t handle the sugar and
fat and substance of it all. What he doesn’t know is
that puking is relief sweeter than the forbidden itself,
more satisfying than sneaking the snack even though
I know the action will quickly be revealed. Life
rats me out. I can’t even gorge on cookies without
something telling on me.

We are locked down, behind bars of our own

making. We have closed our doors against the
world because the world is out to get us. Cafes and
restaurants offer take-out only, get it and go, here’s
your hat, what’s your goddamned hurry? We got
corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day and I
drove over expecting crowds. What was I thinking?
It wasn’t like they could stay, belly up to the bar,
swill Guinness, watch something wordless on the
television. I walked in and it was like some sort of
culinary funeral. I have no idea how businesses are
going to stay open under these conditions.

Simple answer: They won’t.

I ask him if what I’m writing is okay. He says to talk

about myself, that feeling stuff that I’m always talking
about. Fact is, I have very few feelings. Fact is, I’m
shut down like the hat store in Elmwood, like that

42 A l l i s on L an d a
vegan place on University. I’m not looking at the back
of the door; I am the back of the door.

What do you talk about when everything exists

behind glass?

We fill the days, watching snippets of Meet the Press,

railing on the so-called president again, subbing in
Pence when we simply can’t repeat that other name
one more time. It’s politics I used to think. It’s not
personal. When I see pictures of coffins unloaded
in Italy, mass graves dug in Iran, temperatures
obsessively taken in Wuhan, I know better.

I have changed this last week. That I do know. I look

in the mirror and I see someone who understands
things I couldn’t comprehend seven days prior.
Hell, two weeks ago we went to First Friday over
in Oakland, that mass gathering with food trucks
and music and the beer and empanadas we ate in
some outside garden with classic cars and hipster art
looking on. We laughed, too, a lot, and we still do to
this day because fuck it, they’re not going to take that.
They won’t get that from us.

Most of all I think about my son, who’s having a

blast. He didn’t leave the house all day yesterday,
didn’t put clothes on either. The back of that door
doesn’t bother him. Except it should. That’s because
he shouldn’t be watching music lessons over the
television, shouldn’t see his friends via a Zoom
call. He should be running like a little maniac at
his lovely and expensive preschool, riding bikes,
clambering onto a swing. He shouldn’t be living life

Alli son Landa 43

through video conference. He should be in its midst.
Every time I admonish him don’t touch, stay away, I
think what the hell has happened to us? And worse,
what will happen to us?

The glass is cracking.

Write about that feeling stuff, he says. That’s what

I’ve been avoiding all this time, and for damn good
reason. Shelter in place is a nicer way of saying cut
yourself off from the rest of the word, isolate, stare
at the back of that door until it seems almost to
shimmer in your line of sight. Stick your finger down
your throat because you’ve got to puke this stuff
up. Action, my mother likes to counsel, is the key to
anxiety.

It’s only been a week. That’s comforting, she said

with sarcasm so thick it coats the tongue. How much
longer? Last night The Guys congregated outside,
hunkering down over a blunt. The back of their door
is glass, polished to a completely transparent shine.

Maybe they know something I don’t.

44 A l l i s on L an d a
 na Dubin
Min

Il o veyo ud o nt die

Today my 3-year-old daughter barfed

all over the bathroom floor
(God forbid she should barf in the toilet)
after drinking too much
hot chocolate.

Alsotoday she screamed bloody

murder in the middle
of the night. I stumbled
down the hallway, croaking
repeatedly, “What’s wrong?!”
“I’m pooping!” she screamed back.
I scooped her up, ran
her to the bathroom, yanked
down her pull-up,
(which, for the record, had no poop in it)
and put her on the toilet.
After a minute she hopped off
happily. I wiped her,
but the paper seemed clean.
It was dark. I couldn’t smell
any poop. “Did you poop?”
“Yeah!” she said, in that peppy way
only a 3-year-old can bring to 3 a.m.
I didn’t believe her
about the poop, but

45
why argue about poop? Maybe
she was having a nightmare?
Maybe I am?

Alsotoday my 7-year-old son poked

his sister in the eyeball while
I was driving.
“Why did you DO that?!”
I yelled feeling so much
pressure—trapped inside
my chest and throat.
“She said I couldn’t hurt her.”
“And you wanted to
prove her wrong?!”
“Uh huh.”

Alsotoday, alsointhecar, afterthepoking, my son said

to his sister, “Do you know what happened
to my heart when you were born?”
“What?” she said. “It filled
up so huge with love for you.”
I looked in the rearview, searching
for genuineness, looking
to see if she hears
him really hears him,
the way I do.
I wanted to tell him,
“That happened to me too.”
I wanted to apologize
for yelling at him, apologize
to both of them.
“Earlier,” I imagined saying,
“When you reached
for the bench

46 Mi n n a Dub i n
on the trail
and I screamed,
DON’T TOUCH THE BENCH!!!!!
hand outstretched as I ran
toward you in slo-mo, then
doused your hand with the
last drops of hand sanitizer
in the world,
and said in a panicked voice, RUB THEM ’TIL
THEY’RE DRY!
what I meant to say is,
Iloveyoudontdie.”

Mi nna Du bi n 47
 Bennett
Jon

Big Wheel

We were 13 and had 2 liters

of watermelon wine cooler
because of Tim, a dude
who’d give you $5
if he could take your picture
with no shirt on
“No touching...”
or give you some weed
“No touching...”
though some kids
left his place with a $20
Anyhow, we were lit
“Rasberry’s better,” I said
“Gimme,” said Dave
“You gonna puke?”
“Nah.”
We went down The Path
which cut between the houses
“Hey, lookee,” said Dave
There was a Big Wheel
in a backyard
“Yeah,” I said
I slipped in and got it
and we took turns
riding it like crazy people
It was funny because

49
 just a few years before
me and Dave took our Big Wheels
very seriously
but now it was, like,
ironic
Then the police came
“What!?” said Dave
“Don’t run,” said one cop
“It’s reported stolen,” said the other
They put it in their trunk
and brought us back to the house
The Big Wheel was covered in mud
and me and Dave
had to hose it down
in the people’s front yard,
their little boy
watching us
eyes wide
like it was the most
amazing thing
he’d ever seen.

50 Jon Bennett
 h Lucas
Leig

A r t M o n st e r
I picked up flowers from the Bi-Rite, gaudy
orange foxgloves in plain brown paper.
Light off the sidewalk, aroma of human piss,
then beside me a middle-schooler
in his green polo and hand-me-down
khakis. His hiss and prowl and hey girl
what I wouldn’t do—I dropped
an ear bud, hey fuck off I didn’t mean to say it
like that but once done—the look on his face,
the look
was just a child’s. We were both undone.

Monster on sang the opera chorus,

their ridiculous genitalia wagging.
I wish there were a puppeteer
but I am responsible for this private
spectacle, real grief from real kick. You’re
a zeroooo sang the choir in the infernos.
Costumed Satan swung his plastic triton.

51
 We have to believe in something holy—only
differently than what we thought, what we
were taught.
I limped back home. When school got out
I couldn’t help but look for him
from my high window, but each child
was the same. The foxgloves though,
each bloom so different, in shape and shade, girth
and length.
I opened my notebook, named the flowers Jonas,
Teddy, Kate.

52 L e i g h L uc as
 yn Carter
Rob

E x c e l si o r

As you climb the stairs, the cocky squeak of a Sharpie

grabs your ears, pulls your eyes to the back where
blades of inky felt skate across the ceiling in lawless
loops. Up front, someone’s grandma muttering at
invisible demons in a language you don’t speak. Still,
because of her surgical mask and nitrile gloves, you
can tell she is a healer. The old woman drags her trash
bag down the aisle and it crinkles with sour-smelling
promise, settles into the spot for wheelchairs.

When the woman lowers her tiny frame onto a seat, you
picture frozen twigs snapping, but when she positions
her tongs so they make a less-than symbol on her lap,
you do that thing where you repeat a word over and
over until it’s no longer language or even sound. Only
motion, in this case, the tip of your tongue tapping
the spot where your front teeth anchor themselves to
the roof of your mouth—tongs, tongs, tongs, tongs—and
you don’t picture anything but the equation in front of
you: the tool’s open handles reaching for the crumpled
empties, its point aimed at the wailing toddler who
stands on the next seat. He yanks the cord you pull
when you want to get off and pounds a fist into a
kiss of Royal Crown a long-departed passenger left
on the window, wrinkling the world outside so that
other lives look like weather.

53
The crying makes your nipples buzz and your breasts
turn to rocks. There is a primordial rhythm to the
child’s sobs, so thick and gristly you could pluck them
from the air and keep them in the same box as the
keen and caw of the creatures that blackened the sky
here before their sacrifice in rituals that painted the
horizon the color of flat, watery Coke, a summons for
conjuring plastic-skinned miracles that talk and move
but don’t listen or feel. Toys, explosives, spacecraft
interiors. The headphones that cushion the boy’s
mother’s ears. The synthy beat leaking into this capsule
of noise and fluorescent stillness hurtling you into the
gullet of night. When the girl hums her eyes closed
and strokes her boy’s curls—his mouth still a loud,
quivering ring—the beat and the hum and the child’s
crystalline wail melt into one bald sound that drains
into the throb of your tits, a wonderous pulsating
you clock at the molecular level: a network of ducts
pumping sustenance meant for human infants into
the spent elastic weave of your bra, clotting in the
metal hooks and eyes of its front clasp. Sometimes the
mechanics of a thing are all you can bear, other times,
they’re more heartbreaking than the thing itself. This
time they’re both.

While your arms busy themselves crossing and

uncrossing over your damp t-shirt, the bus splits the
city’s face and you watch the same shell game play
out over and over with different losers. A tourist in
a cable car sweatshirt. Some white guy who needs to
prove he’s not racist. The man with a face like toasted
sourdough who got on at Bonita Footwear loses
because he’s drunk. When he stumbles off toward
the El Farolito between France and Russia, the baby

54 R ob yn C a r t e r
stops crying to seize the late-night tucked between his
mother’s fingers. As he licks away its last hour, the old
woman with the tongs takes her place at the end of the
redemption line and you feel your way through a new
day’s fog. Your outstretched hands fin through the air
in front of you until the sticky pull at your rib cage
draws them to your heart. The milky membrane there
has dried into a crinkle of floury scabs that glue your
shirt to your skin. The next step is to brush them into
the gossamer dawn and fold yourself into the socket of
time when the street beneath your emptied body is a
raised palm and the shrouded moon is an albuminous
eye.

When you find it, make yourself as small as possible

and picture your resurrection, the leftover suturing
thread knotting itself around your limbs with the
chipper drudgery of marionette strings and a voice
that tells you to surrender to its sloppy tug until your
nerves are stuffed with polyester batting and your
blood is made of asbestos and the only part of your
mind that’s left is the pebble in its shoe: a shadowy
Polaroid of the second-grade you in Toughskin floods
and messy ponytails, a dented Ponch & Jon lunch
box in your fist, snapped the day you said something
without raising your hand and waiting to be called on.
The teacher tore a strip of masking tape from the roll
around her wrist and stuck it to your desk. Next time,
Mrs. Dill said, it goes over your mouth.

But like a lot of pebbles, this one is actually more of

a dirt clod. It splits in half when you try to crush it,
and now there are two, the second, block-shaped and
wooden: Mrs. Dill’s desk, its surface dotted in blue

Robyn Ca rt e r 55
 and yellow containers of scissors for small, naughty
hands, clustered around a mechanical ballerina who
performed beneath a dome of glass. Think about the
future the only way you know how, with the lurching
grace of that nylon-haired automaton. In the swell of
panic that comes when you sense each near-crash of
her plastic toe into the transparent wall of her prison,
you are soothed by the glitch in her spin and the
uncracked sky of her world and now know it’s time to
learn the trembling secret of her dance.

56 R ob yn C a r t e r
 ielle Bero
Dan

W ord
I still love poetry. Some of it. The kind I like.
When we fuck at night.
The second wind before actually sleeping, the dusk
vibrates. You respond
to my hugs with squirms and sick days. I draw to your
morning
dressings of face paint and smell goods. I know what
pretty means.
It doesn’t last. The words aren’t remembered but the
scent is
often reminded in passing. Fraud is the best way to
describe aging. Crayon under fingernails. Old
food stains on gray shirts. I am alone for once, in
my room
hearing echoes from past house parties. The perfor-
mance- self ready with
a crisp black shirt on. The black ants marching across
the screen. The world
before civilization, and country lines and immigra-
tion. Just the dream.
I am tired
of catching patches of sky

57
 I think about the boy
on the bus
and where he will be
buried
and if anyone will place
flowers
on the carved stone in the names of clouds

a teal and orange dragon fly

clips on to one green strand
sways back and forth
and this motherfucker
moves like
a
blade
of grass.

58 Dan i e l l e B e r o
 ja min Guccia
en rd
B i
T h e I n v i si b l e H a n d
K n o cks Twice

and leaves a cardboard box on my porch. I place the

parcel on my table beside a vase of dead sunflowers and
consider whether to open it or call my mother, whose
hip is giving out. Inside the delivered box, another
package with the same rectangular dimensions, the
same sky-blue tape sealing the slits. Did I order
something? Neither box has a label. Inside the second
package, a third, slightly smaller. I think of nested silver
spoons, a set of Russian dolls—the chain of dark-eyed
daisies intricately painted on a scarf tied around the
plump matriarch’s face as she returns from threshing
wheat in a distant field somewhere, a black hen beneath
her arm. But this is no parable of winter. Inside the
third box, styrofoam peanuts surround a dozen
chocolate globes the size of marbles. I pick one up and
cradle the map printed on the wrapper—the world
rendered borderless, a land mass contiguous and beige.
Someone told me if you inflate a marble to the size of
the Earth the imperfections on the seemingly smooth
glass would form unclimbable mountains, plumbless
seas. I shed the foil from the small Earth and crumple
the wrapper into a silver moon and place the milk-
chocolate mantle beneath my tongue, lie down among
the cardboard and Styrofoam, and feel the plates shift
and the crust buckle inside my body, where demand for
connection always outpaces supply.
59
- may 4, 2020 -