CELLAR

DOOR
X X X V I I . 1
CELLAR
DOOR
X X X V I I . 1
THE UNDERGRADUATE LITERARY MAGAZINE
of the UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
 CONTENTS

V I S UA L A RT P O E T RY
ALLISON BAILEY / Playg round / 9 REBECCA HOLMES / Living Fossils / 8
JONATHAN YOUNG / Chief L ollipop / 11 NOAH DEHMER / Inishmore /10
LIANA ROUX / L ucky Cats / 14 KATHERINE INDERMAUR / Nigh t in August / 15
ALLISON BAILEY / Nightlight / 16 REBECCA HOLMES / Danger / 17
ARIEL RUDOLPH / Better Homes and Gardens / 18 MEREDITH JONES / L ori Singer Needs Some
JESSICA KENNEDY / Tristesse de l ’Hiv er / 19 Psychiatric Help / 20
ARIEL RUDOLPH / Urban Renewal / 25 SARAH HUENER / Summertime / 28
JANE HALL / Self Portrait / 26 EVAN ROSE / 430 Rose / 29
JOSEPHINE McCRANN / So Transparent / 26 LIANA ROUX / Backyard, Hybart Street / 34
M ICHELA WAGNER / Wildflowers / 27 GRACE M AC NAIR / Washing Silver / 43
ASHLEY ANDERSEN / Mind, Body, and Soul / 33 DAVID HUTCHESON / Trap Shopping / 45
LARISSA KAUL / Erin / 42 LIANA ROUX / The Piccadilly Line to Russell
JESSICA KENNEDY / Here, Now / 52 Square / 46
DAVID HUTCHESON / Out in Arizona / 48

FICTION I N T E RV I E W

A. REES SWEENEY-TAYLOR / Mountain Tea / 12 MARIA CARLOS /

M AT T BOULET TE / By Now / 30 Inter view with Martha Rhodes / 21
BO ZHANG / The Mermaid ’s Gift / 35
DORUK ONVURAL / Coming Home / 44
PETER PENDERGRASS / JUDGES & PRIZES / 6
the spider in my bedroom / 47
ARIEL RUDOLPH / I’d Want to Know / 49 CONTRIBUTORS / 53

NOTES / 54 & 55

COVER:

Wi l d f l o w e r s , b y
M I C H E L A WA G N E R

© Cellar Door 2011

All rights reserved

Cellar Door, the undergraduate literary magazine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is published twice annually
and welcomes submissions from all undergraduate students currently enrolled. Guidelines for submission can be found online at
http://studentorgs.unc.edu/thedoor. Contact us at thecellardoor.unc@gmail.com.

Publication of this issue of Cellar Door was made possible by the generous financial support of the UNC Student Government.
 S TA F F

E D I T O R- I N - C H I E F Zena Cardman

ART EDITOR Grayson Bland

FICTION EDITOR Samuel Lemley
P O E T RY E D I T O R Maria Carlos

TREASURER Maria Carlos

ART STAFF Samantha Rodan

Wilson Sayre
Michelle Wainer

FICTION STAFF Cannon Allen

Jordan Castelloe
Maria Devlin
Stephanie Komoski
J.W. O’Neill IV

P O E T RY S TA F F Joe Albernaz
Caleb Agnew
Sarah Bufkin
Alisha Gard
Ella Ott
Hannah Riddle

L AY O U T & D E S I G N Zena Cardman & Samuel Lemley

FAC U LT Y A DV I S O R Michael McFee

PUBLISHER Samuel Lemley

6

JUDGES

D A N I E L A L L E G R U C C I ( A R T ) was born in
Fayetteville, NC to a military family. As a child he moved frequently,
living all over the US and in Italy. After several years in upstate New
York, he relocated to Charlotte where he received his BFA with a
concentration in printmaking from UNC-Charlotte. He continued
his studies at Wichita State University before returning to his present
home, Charlotte, NC. His work has been shown throughout the
Southeast and is included in collections in Germany and Hong Kong.

T É A O B R E H T ( F I C T I O N ) was born in 1985 in

former Yugoslavia and has lived within the United States since 1997.
Obreht was selected earlier this year by the New Yorker as one of
“twenty young writers who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of
contemporary American fiction.” Her work has been anthologized in
diverse short-story collections including The Best American Short Stories
2010 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. Her first book,
The Tiger’s Wife, has been hailed by T.C. Boyle as “a novel of surpassing
beauty, exquisitely wrought and magical,” identifying Obreht as “a
towering new talent.” The Tiger’s Wife will be published on Random
House early in 2011. Updates and additional information can be found
on Téa’s website: http://www.teaobreht.com. Téa Obreht lives and
writes in Ithaca, New York.

M A R T H A R H O D E S ( P O E T R Y ) is the author of
three poetry collections, most recently, Mother Quiet. She teaches at
the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Sarah
Lawrence College. She is a founding editor and the director of Four
Way Books, an independent literary press in New York City.
 7

PRIZES

ART FIRST PLACE Chief Lollipop

Jonathan Young

SECOND PLACE So Transparent

Josephine McCrann

THIRD PLACE La Tristesse de L’Hiver

Jessica Kennedy

FICTION FIRST PLACE Mountain Tea

A. Rees Sweeney-Taylor
SECOND PLACE
the spider in my bedroom
Peter Pendergrass
THIRD PLACE
I’d Want to Know
Ariel Rudolph

POETRY FIRST PLACE The Piccadilly Line to Russell Square

Liana Roux

SECOND PLACE Out in Arizona

David Hutcheson

THIRD PLACE Living Fossils

Rebecca Holmes
8
REBECCA HOLMES

Living Fossils

It doesn’t seem to belong to the past of this planet,

with four hearts, two brains, a single testicle—
worm with a skull, dark embryo: the hagfish.

No child fascinated by dinosaurs could love it,

this living fossil, unchanged in 300 million years.
Not petrified, but preserved in viscid time
on the cold bed of the ocean,

so dark, so deep it escaped evolution

or was left behind: the round mouth turning like a gear,
forever the lensless eye.

II

The saltwater crocodile is thriving in the coastal rivers

near Darwin, Australia, as dinosaurs burn on the roads
as fossil fuel. Long ago among the ferns, did an ancestor

pray for immortality? Now everything familiar

is dust and oil. A tagged crocodile leaves the coast,
swims far into the open ocean, sometimes reappears
hundreds of miles away—and sometimes vanishes.

Maybe his tag came loose and sank too deep for radios
to hear. Or maybe he paused among the waves, inhaled
the salt air once more and dove: deep down, out of time
to reptile Valhalla, to take his place among the ferns
being crushed to grease in the heart of the Earth.
 9

ALLISON BAILEY r Playground

10
NOAH DEHMER

Inishmore

The endless wind

has carved and hollowed their cheeks
and made ancient weathered stones
of their cheekbones.

Their bodies have caught and held a small

shred of the gusts,
so that even in a lull it continues to
howl and wander
within their worn leathery skin.

And me, walking through

their narrow roads,
a camera at my hip,
tangled in my own myths
and all the worldly woes
of my joyful sinking America.
I don’t like my iPod anymore.

To the shore
where, opening to the endless,
all dreams suspend.
But it’s low tide. I tread
carefully across the algae,
and seaweed draped over rocks,
and lottery tickets and coupons in the seaweed—
all like little billboards or storefronts swept away
in the great green flood
to start over again.

Not far in front of me,

where the water will rise by night,
a fisherman teaches his son to paint
over the five peeling layers of Laura II.

I squint my eyes. The son has stopped.

What is he doing?
He is putting his ear to his father
and listening to the sea, to the endless wind.
 11

J O N AT H A N YO U N G r C h i e f L o l l i p o p
12
A . R E E S S W E E N E Y-TAY L O R
M o u n t a i n Te a
Up in the mountains, I was learning things. Hiking
through summer pastures in the northern foothills of the
Caucasus Mountains, I was remembering things too. We
were a couple of kilometers above sea level, and I learned
the Turkic words for peaks in the distance and how to tell
currants from sweet, poisonous berries. During the day
I remembered how the packed weight of your room and
board settles comfortably on your hips. And at night, I
remembered the tart joy of tea, steeped from early, green
apples and mint.
There were herds of sheep and cattle wandering
those hilltops with us, and through the night we could
hear the cowbells ringing occasionally and distantly. In the
mornings, the animals would come investigate the smells
of our kasha, and we would laugh at them and shoo them
away. Then we would straighten up and peer down at the
day’s hike into the next valley, where a thin, silver river
seemed to snake motionlessly. Over and away, always to
our south, atop the sheer black rock of the main Caucasus
range, massive glaciers glistened in the sun. Everything
was beautiful up there. Sometimes I would tell Yuri, the
Russian I was traveling with, how spectacularly beautiful
I thought it all was. With a nod, he’d agree.
Yuri had planned our route. We were travelling west
to east, parallel to the main ridge, which runs latitudinally
from the Black to Caspian Sea. From those five thousand
meter peaks, glacial rivers have cut valleys north towards
central Russia. The ridges of these valleys rise one after
another like a giant’s washboard, and we could count eight
or nine of them separating us from the twin summits of
the highest peak in Europe, Mount Elbrus. On the first
night, we camped near the massive dome of an old Soviet
telescope. Among the wooden huts of the Karachay
shepherds, the dome’s glistening apex is a reminder of
that ancient, hulking empire that has struggled to lay
claim to this mountain wilderness for over two centuries.
Each day, we would descend into one of those
valleys and take our lunch by a river, glacial and turbid
from the eroded moraine. We would eat crackers and
cheese and bathe naked in the empty valleys and then lie
on the shady banks, sipping tea we had steeped in the
morning and carried in thermoses the long way down. In
the valleys, there are small dirt roads that run along the
rivers, and we would walk along them, looking for a way
up the other side. It was hot down in the valleys during
the day, but we had the cold river running there beside us
and the pleasant shade of poplar or birch trees.
We would meet people on the roads. We met
an old woman with a wispy mustache and thick gray
muttonchops. She showed us her wicker basket, full of
mushrooms, and grinned her sun-burnt cheeks: “This
year, dear ones—this is a mushroom year.” We agreed and
told her we’d seen many mushrooms and that was before
last night’s rain.
Further along that road, three men were quarrying
rock out of a narrow gorge and tossing the big chunks
of shale onto their truck bed. It was hot and the work
seemed dangerous, and the men took their time talking
to us and looking at our map.
Later, we hitched a ride with some workers who
were removing scree with dynamite in the cliffs along the
river. When we came upon them, they were all scattering
and telling us to stand back, and then the rock face blew
up. After that, they took us, in the wooden bed of their
truck, to a place where the ascent was less severe.
We met herdsmen spending the summer in alpine
pastures, following their herds with dogs and horses.
Their faces were deep red from the sun and the altitude,
and they all wore rubber galoshes. The first morning of
our hike, after breakfast, when the herd had moved on
and we were breaking camp, a rider approached. He was
short, wore brown corduroys tucked into his galoshes, and
had a plaid unbuttoned shirt which hung loosely from his
shoulders. His exposed chest was all dark hair and golden
skin. He gave the impression of controlled strength, and
he rode superbly. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,”
he greeted us. “Caves, you want to see caves? I’ll show you
the best vistas. I’ll show you how beautiful our mountains
are. All for free. You can ride my horse if you like. Come
to my place and I’ll feed you—all for free.” His name was
Azamat, and he was insistent that we pass some time with
him.

He asked us where we were from. “I’m from
Stavropol and he’s American,” Yuri answered. The man’s
eyes shone at me.
“From the U.S.A.?” he asked. “I have a brother who
lives there. Name some cities,” he demanded.
“Boston…New York, maybe,” I hesitated.
“Oh! New Jersey, the state of New Jersey,” he cried.
He began speaking quickly. “Yolki-palki! I forget. State—
New Jersey, not far from New York, name some cities.”
He spoke Russian with a heavy mountain accent.
“Newark,” I began again.
“No! Not New York; the state is New Jersey.” He
was crouching on his hams, lost to his surroundings and
staring at the ground. “Name some more cities.”
“Princeton, Trenton…”
“No, no,” he muttered. “Yolki-palki!” Now standing
and agitated, he paced in his galoshes through the
mountain grasses up near the top of the world.
“It’s no problem. New Jersey’s small—if he’s not far
from New York, I basically know where he lives. How
do you have a brother there?” For a while there was no
answer; Azamat was deep in thought. Then, suddenly:
“Not my brother, my cousin—my cousin came and
visited me for a month. Bleen!”
“How long has he lived there?”
“No, he was born there—he’s a distant cousin;
ancestors—his ancestors moved there,” he said
distractedly. “Blyat!” He was swearing now and crouched
again. “Blyat! He stayed here a whole month, came all the
way from America, just a couple of years ago, and I don’t
even remember the city’s goddamn name! What are some
New Jersey cities?” he demanded from Yuri.
“I’d never even heard of the place,” Yuri shrugged.
“Atlantic City!” I cried.
“No! No, bleen.” Azamat was up and pacing.
“Don’t worry—it’ll come back to you.” It was getting
late in the morning, and we had a long way to hike. It was
silent while we broke camp. Azamat was still pacing. Then
we were ready to leave and we told Azamat. He stopped
and shook his head. “Yolki-palki—a relative comes all the
way over here to visit and I don’t remember the name of
13
his hometown.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I know more or less where
he’s from.”
“It’ll come back to you,” Yuri assured him.
Azamat seemed to remember himself. “I’ll take you
anywhere you want to go. Look up there at that summit:
down here we’re just a chick, and up there’s a full-grown
hen. You can see everything from up there. I’ll take you—
all for free.”
“We don’t have time; we’re trying to make it to
Teberda by Saturday,” Yuri said and showed him our
map. While he studied it, Yuri and I took turns riding his
chestnut mare.
“You’re trying for Teberda? Teberda is very far. You
won’t make it in three days. Better to stay a few days up
here. I’ll feed you, take care of you.”
But the day was getting on, and Teberda was very far.
Shaking his head, Azamat mounted his horse. We began
our steep descent off of that beautiful mountain pasture,
and he trotted after the herds that had gradually rounded
the next hill. Ahead of us, two-headed Elbrus rose white
and solitary; behind Azamat the dome of the observatory
caught the glint of the early sun. We had a long way to
hike that day, but we were certain to find apples and mint
down in the valley.
R
14

LIANA ROUX r Lucky Cats

 15
K AT H E R I N E I N D E R M AU R

Night in August

Flowers do not sleep, she says.

They open at night, too; even
in moonless dark, their pale faces
yawn, broadening. They stretch
but do not sleep.

They are eyes, wide

and stargazing. Moths flock
to their sweetness, tongues
uncurling like two lovers
nightswimming, luminous
limbs spread to float.
Blossoms are the stars
of the ground. See how
they are the sky?

She combs her fingers

through milky petals
(they shimmer at her touch)
and bounds down the beach,
not cloaked in shadow
but cleaving it in two.
Her body is a ground-moon
in the waves, glowing.
16

ALLISON BAILEY R Nightlight

 17
REBECCA HOLMES

Danger

Everyone knows these days

that fault lines twitch, the sun flares,
and cosmic rays burn through our brains.

Radon decays, comets careen

out of orbit, and ocean waves rise
to the windowsills—but we are smarter

than dinosaurs and all these dangers

may not be the end. Still the sun
grows old and ruddy, the universe

will cool to silence or flash bluely back

upon itself, and I become the woman who
studied logic for a lifetime, built computers,

filled onionskin pages with proofs,

tried urgently to find it: one thing
which cannot be erased.
18

ARIEL RUDOLPH R Better Homes and Gardens

 19

J E S S I C A K E N N E DY R Tr i s t e s s e d e l ’ H i v e r
20
MEREDITH JONES

Lori Singer Needs Some Psychiatric Help

When I open my eyes, the train is closer

than I thought, the length of a hundred of me
unfolding over the tracks
like a paper cut-out, a hundred accordion men
clasping each other’s hands.

The signal bangs on next to my ear, its one red

warning eye winking at me, click click.
My shirt is shivering on my back.
I feel my veins expand in anticipation, blood going
double the speed of the train.

I open my mouth and let all the air in my lungs

tumble out in one big fissure of a yell.

Then my cheek is caked with clay, one long

slick of mud down my side, and the other aching
with the force of Ren’s tackle, pressed chest
to arm to chest. He’s huffing air in my face,
pink with anger.

The train races past us, shaking the bush

near my feet like a chandelier.

Ren rubs a hand over his face:

Does everybody in this town just spend their time
trying to scare the shit out of themselves?

The skin of my back starts to sting.

I’m not as scared as you, I say.

 21
MARIA CARLOS

I N T E RV I E W
with Martha Rhodes

It was a day of firsts: first time in New Hampshire,

first sighting of a “Beware: Moose X-ing” sign on
the highway, and first encounter with Martha
Rhodes. I was in Franconia for the Frost Place
Festival and Conference on Poetry, my stomach
in knots–part nervousness, part excitement, part
moose-anxiety. I found the check-in table, where
I was greeted by Martha, the conference director,
as if we’d already met, as if we were two friends
picking up on a half-remembered conversation.

“Now Maria,” she said, holding my room key, “the

building you’ll be staying in is co-ed so you’ll have to
shower in the downstairs bathroom. You’re so young
and spry –we don’t want you to see anything disturbing.

Disturbing? “Thanks, Martha, my mom will be glad

to hear it.”

I left the conference with a renewed excitement

to write and the sneaking suspicion that Martha
and I would continue picking up on conversations
for years to come (and of course seized the first
opportunity to interview her). I confess I also left a
little bit disappointed–for all the suspense and build-
up along the highway, I never saw a single moose.
 22
☞ M A R I A C A R L O S : We met at the Frost Place,
shortly after its Conference on Poetry and Teaching, which
got me thinking: I’m especially curious about a poet’s
approach to teaching poetry classes, having recently read
The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo, in which he says,
“You’ll never be a poet until you realize that everything
I say today and this quarter is wrong…. Every moment, I
am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like
me. But I hope you learn to write like you.”
M A R T H A R H O D E S : I don’t agree. I think
that as teachers who write we can catch ourselves from
trying to teach people to write like we do – this is a pitfall,
Hugo is right. We can present our ideas for a poem as
suggestions only, as demonstrations of process, rather
than ideas for how the poet should navigate across and
down the page.
C A R L O S : How should poets advise their students?
To what extent should we listen?
R H O D E S : We can present multiple ideas and
encourage our students to try multiple approaches. I
always begin by saying that I am perfectly capable of
making suggestions that can muck up a student’s poem.
The point is that I want to teach writers to revise, to try
things, to bust loose, be bold, and challenge their work
and bring poems through multiple and often radical
revisions. They can always revert to previous versions.
C A R L O S : Speaking of Hugo’s The Triggering Town,
the author argues later in the book: “Somehow you must
switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the
words.” That is, the connection between the poet and the
words on the page must be stronger than his connection
with the subject that triggered the poem. In reading your
poems, the music of the words seemed just as important
as the speaker’s fearless relaying of the raw emotional
truth. It seems your allegiance lies with the subject and
the words. Are they truly mutually exclusive?
R H O D E S : I allow myself, always, to bust the
premise of the poem and to investigate where the language
wants to take me. I might begin with premise, or a raison
d’être, but I always allow myself to break loose, at least
in drafts, to see where else the language might take me
– I recombine elements of the poem, pairing words with
other words, to see if I might travel into new, uncharted
terrain. The words and music lead me to the poem. I
rarely begin with IDEA.
C A R L O S : Your first collection, At the Gate,
revolves largely around the speaker’s heavy and haunting
memories. But when dealing with issues of sexual abuse
or the complex and often conflicting feelings towards
a lost loved one, poets seem to be forced to walk on a
tightrope, that fine line between being honest and being
labeled “confessional.” Do you have any advice for young
poets who, like your speaker, are attempting to piece
together their pasts through poetry?
R H O D E S : First, a good poet is able to transcend
her own experiences. We are not journalists. So, we can
imagine situations, imagine plights, dilemmas, conflict.
This frees us to write our poems –that we can take on
characters and their demons as our own. They MAY
be our own, they may not be. That is our secret. Too,
we are in service of the poem, not of our lives. That
gives us additional freedom. Aristotle said it this way
(paraphrased), ‘It doesn’t matter if it is so, only that it may
be so.’ Our job is to make it so on the page. To create a
world on the page in which things may be so.
C A R L O S : How were you able to keep your poems
from sounding “confessional”?

R H O D E S : I allow myself, as a writer, to remember,
to speculate, to feel, and to imagine. This broadens
me as a poet and as a person. It allows me to see the
texture, the dimension, the bigger picture. If I am
writing from memory, then, I am also able to imagine the
world of others in the memory and this allows me to be
empathetic – it allows me to imagine, too, my speakers’
multiple positions. Perhaps my speaker feels hatred
toward, but probably also feels love toward, and there is
also the matter of complicity, yes?
C A R L O S : Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t say people feel
or remember things in straight lines.
R H O D E S : I try, very hard, to see past circumstance
or event alone and look into the human heart and mind
and its complexities. We need our imagination, our
perceptions, are willingness to mine our material in order
to do that.
C A R L O S : Once we get to your second collection,
Perfect Disappearance, the speaker seems to have grown in
several ways: intellectually, sexually, emotionally. And
yet, the same undertones of alienation and abandonment
permeate throughout this collection, as in the previous.
To what would you attribute the speaker’s simultaneous
strength and inability to let go?
R H O D E S : I think, for me, it’s a matter of how the
writer has grown – in order to achieve the complexities of
a poem, we have to grow as writers, to learn over and over
again, for each poem, how to write the poem – to learn
how to manage our material by looking at the poem as it
begins to present itself to us and making decisions as to
how to work narrative, music, structure, and imagination.
See what I mean?
23
CARLOS: Sure, like Gregory Orr’s “Four
Temperaments.”
R H O D E S : If you see growth in the book, you are
probably seeing growth in the writing.
C A R L O S : Your poems have such a range –a lot of
free verse, some rhymed poems, a mixture of long and
short lines, some dialogue. You must have a wide variety
of influences.
R H O D E S : Yes, a wide variety of influences. First
influence: Roethke for his music and his ability to go deep
and wild.
C A R L O S : I’d like to discuss the other roles you play
in the poetry world, aside from being a poet. For instance,
the Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry –you
served as the conference director. How important is it
for a poet to attend conferences like this?
R H O D E S : I think that any community building
experience for a writer CAN BE great. It depends on the
writer’s temperament. For some, it could be a bad thing
– some people just don’t thrive in that kind of setting.
C A R L O S : What sets a conference apart from,
say, workshops and classes in an undergraduate creative
writing program such as the one here at UNC?
R H O D E S : It is a great experience to be away from
ones usual setting, to test oneself in the outer banks,
so to speak. To be away from those who know you and
your work and to learn from other writers. A conference
offers, often, a wider range of writers at different stages of
their lives. For instance at The Frost Place we had writers
from age 17 -85. We had faculty in their thirties and early
MARIA CARLOS, Inter view
24
sixties.
C A R L O S : I have to admit, I don’t think I ever fully
appreciated Robert Frost’s poems until I saw the house
and museum, the mountains, the landscape in Franconia.
As readers of poetry, how important is it for us to explore
the poet’s background and history to understand his or
her work? Or does this jeopardize the separation we’re
taught to make between the speaker and the poet?
R H O D E S : We can still see the speaker and poet
as separate entities while understanding what might have
driven the writer to the page.
C A R L O S : What about between the poet and the
person?
R H O D E S : I am not sure what you mean, really,
by the person behind the poet. I think the poet is the
person. But the poet’s creations may not be the poet. I
write, often, about the country, rarely about the city. Yet
I live in a city. But my travels and my imagination inform
the landscape of my poems, both internal and external.
C A R L O S : Speaking of the city –another one of the
“poetry hats” you wear is director and one of the founding
editors of Four Way Books in NYC, which has published
numerous collections by emerging poets for years. When
and how did publishing become a focus of your poetic
career?
R H O D E S : I am a founding editor – there were three
other writers who joined me in the early years. After I
graduated from Warren Wilson College, I saw how many
people were struggling to get their work published. I just
thought I could help the situation by putting out books
each year. And I did. The reasoning was pretty simple,
basic. It was something I thought I could do!
C A R L O S : I couldn’t imagine being so busy, working
as a poet and a publisher of other poets and not to mention
teaching (well, I can imagine it but it terrifies me). You’ve
invested so much into poetry but unfortunately these days
the craft seems underappreciated and underestimated.
What role do you see contemporary poetry playing in our
world?
R H O D E S : You know, I don’t think too much about
this. I write because I have written for so long (since
my teens). I can tell you what role it has in MY life. It
enriches it, keeps me centered, stable, healthy in mind
and spirit, engaged with the world. By reading other
writers, I learn about the world and learn how to manage
my own poems (and life) better. It enlarges what might
have been an impoverished life.
C A R L O S : What role should it play?
R H O D E S : I like the NEA’s statement of purpose: A
great nation deserves great art. I believe this is so. I believe
that as art makers we thrive when we are surrounded
by work that has been labored over, thought about,
strategized, sculpted into being through determination,
imagination, and a willingness to allow the piece to teach
us the way to proceed. As appreciators of art, we learn by
looking for and appreciating the cues that the artists give
us as to how to see their work. A poet teaches us how to
read her poem by punctuating it in a certain way (even
by not punctuating it), by laying it out on the page in a
certain way, by choosing specific words, line lengths, etc.
So, we grow as readers, by understanding these cues and
bringing that understanding to our reading.
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 25

ARIEL RUDOLPH R Urban Renewal

26

JANE HALL R Self Portrait

J O S E P H I N E M c C R A N N R S o Tr a n s p a r e n t
 27

M I C H E L A WA G N E R R Wi l d f l o w e r s
28
SARAH HUENER

Summertime

The grass is sweating upward toward the clouds

and we’ve long since become the people who
we are in summertime. The darkened shrouds
above the pines are graying to the west,
are pulling with the heavy sun: away.
The length of days perhaps is what propels
us to illusion. Hours of light to spend,
we overflow inventing things, ourselves,
then spend our autumns trying to recall
the way we used to be, and whose, and why.

But now, aware of time and full of fear,

we look around too fiercely, photograph
too much. In desperation we refuse
to own a clock that has a second hand,
then find we must ignore our pulses’ throbs
that seem to echo silenced second hands
on watches stripped of batteries and thrust
into the backs of drawers. With no escape,
we ask, with midnight, winter hurtling toward
us like the ground during a fall— how can
we sleep, when even blinking lasts too long?
 
 29
E VA N R O S E

430 Rose

For a while the MOMA allowed

visitors to approach a sort of rostra
flanked by stacks of black speakers

and scream into an unplugged microphone.

This was right in the museum’s capacious gut,
the kind of internal space that remembers

a cathedral, if only because sometimes

sparrows swoop in and can’t figure how
to swoop out (or don’t want to).

I suppose the comment intended

was something like, “a man never feels
more alone than when shouting

in a crowd,” but there weren’t any placards.

And anyways, it reminded me more
of the time a slick pigeon went hara-kiri

on the green glass of my office window,

sweeping in from somewhere up Park
in an even trajectory that turned L-shaped

after contact. I confess my first thought

was not for the fowl, but the passersby
at the end of the L, below, toward whom

this grey little mass was now helicoptering.

Next I thought of the coffee ring
where my mug just was. Then the scratch

on the window. Then, finally, the bird,

whose every place was an empire of itself,
or no place was an empire at all,

whose worlds meant nothing of enclosure,

but always tall shapes in the sky, spindly facades
of gothic cathedrals, interjections, lampposts.
30
M AT T B O U L E T T E
By Now
“Now It gleams with clichés.” and other anaesthetics via Super Soaker to the mewling
—Samson Cosmic, gelding extraordinaire, who frequents
the alleys near the tram station.
“Los ritmos humanos cambian con los dedos del mundo
que dan golpecitos y. . .” and then I let the noise overcome
the openness I felt, unraveling the bandages from my
fingers and turning the plastic knob como una campeona.
“Without the arresting centuries to bear their raw and
blinding noose around like some silly bon vivant, I wasn’t
quite sure how to function as a compassionate human
being. The voluble tracts before me came and went with
frightening precision, and I was frightened. Usually the
reams they dropped (when they didn’t want to identify
themselves) were dirty, burdensome, punctuated with sworn
allegiances and unconscious caprice. Unconscious because
the sway always fell on me. And no explanation either.”
— Doctor Moss, physician to Abuelo Carlos Púlvertaños
George Ramos Pulverton Number Three (Number Ocho
by other lineages) exited his grey Volvo station wagon with
a red-faced and crying infant in the crook of each elbow
(all swaddled, adorable, with miniature faces, with goose-
down eyebrows, too). That visage of his: thickset, bacon-
colored complexion, terrible craggy smile that scrapes
at the cosmic and the physic, sifting through, because at
once grotesque and yet . . . and yet . . . and yet. He had
reticent crackhead lips and a greasy hairline. That’s when
I noticed his subtlety, his serpentine moments (usually I
see bodies with almost medicinal yet less than prudent
clarity; I partly suspect something in his diet—too many
Zebra Cakes? excess of Nerd Ropes??—I think that’s
what sent me erring).
The Infants quit their yapping. Then we tucked them in
the closet, locked the door, and drank bathtub gin for
the remainder of the hour before we had to all go to the
coal mine for 72 hour shifts. I borrowed a rough dose
of Thorazine-MA from a fake dictionary hid under the
floorboards, administered it lovingly, mixed with milk
creatures so they could stay effective at work. That was
gruesome. The teething especially.
In the other room I heard Jackie Comatose hanging
around all bunker-bombed on suppositories, all
cramping up and wiggling around on the shag rug like
an earthworm. He’d gouged the tablets (likely JWH-18)
out of some foil packets he’d brought from his burrow in
the pharmacy dumpster. Later on he vomited forth the
rarest archaeologies- sloppy strips of maps buried with
Magellan and baffling wax cylinder mixtapes of Abraham
Lincoln waking up from reconstructive surgeries, and
even the crib gurglings of W. Shakespeare himself. Old
Abe confesses to bland streaks of vandalism, dirtying
white house linens, the usual severities. To this day Jackie
giggles at their stray, defunct efforts at decaying but, well,
hear me out, I think it denies them something. They were
great men.
George Ramos Pulverton Number Three consumed a
magical recipe that night before the SAT in early June.
Early, sensuous, delectable, no-nonsense, frilly-bough’d
June of my wettest dreams. His grandfather (who I wish
was mine), took him to the shed and poured a burbling
concoction down the young man’s sweating throat using a
rusted out soup ladle. But Grandaddy Charles Pulverton,
incubated in the slums of Buenos Aires, understood the
dynamics of chemistry, and knew the rust couldn’t hurt
much, in fact would even launch the brew to the zenith
of its black magic.
After spewing partially digested rice across the low-
slung vinyl siding of the family’s two bedroom ranch,
GRP#3 had fleeting visions. They were of ochre dolphins
advertising eco-friendly soap, and hysteric crowds
lunging at the rhinestone sky, and windows reverberating
to stillness with the exit of an unknown holy spirit.
Then he puked again, and the Virgin wearing Ray-Bans
appeared, carrying nirvanic souvenirs, withholding her
solemn affections, and tracking nasty Golgotha mud all
over the newly steamed shag carpet (though floating).
GRP#3 paid no credence to her barren provocations,

and started babbling instead about vet checkups, photo
enforcement, virus removal, senior citizens – las pruebas
de sujetos extintos.
The next morning, Jorge Ramos Púlvertaños Numero
Ocho scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT. Unfortunately, a
deathsquad cracked his skull directly afterward, placing a
minor fissure diagonally from his left ear to his forehead.
I’ve never seen anything so grisly. He did survive, but
barely. The deathsquad apologized via text message. How
tacky. How crass. What a tacky, crass, and ineffectual
deathsquad.
If you’d like to see the x-ray I’ll fire up the projector. I’ve
preserved it; I have it stored among the unknown of my
musty cabinets. In the garage, near the other records. We
can go there—right now! I’ll go into the garage and you’ll
follow me.
[The narrator takes my hands in his and looks at me in
the eyes and then tears away, knowing and maudlin.]
When we got back from work, George lit up a Newport
#72 and handed me the change that he owed me from
when I bought him a pack of firecrackers. In our state,
they’re illegal. The conspiracy dissolved. [Conceals a
shrug.]
Covered in luxuriant black coal dust and aching all over,
we piled onto the fold-out couch, shivering and rolling
around moaning like we were underwater, moaning and
moping around in a tangled mass of limbs while snowy
reruns of State Farm commercials elongated their laughs
and coughed through their knuckle cracking. George got
real irritated and rolled right off the couch, presumably to
take a hot shower. I haven’t seen him since.
Sir? ¿Señor?
That’s why I wish I had an answering machine.
[Juan enters from the kitchen holding a carton of
orange juice. He looks quizzical, flustered. He says to
31
the informant “who’s this?” flinging an arm at me. I try
to intercede but there’s a bunch of back-scratching and
shoptalk. I couldn’t quite keep up. They settle it, I guess.
Later, there’s all this noisy analysis from Juan, a tirade,
in fact, about the informant’s feelings of inferiority vis-
á-vis George’s credit score, patent leather shoes, grocery
habits, and a trillion other things, with the informant
worrying himself into catalepsy, insomnia, grimy palms,
pacing monologues, dimmed hair gloss, etc. etc. A wild
shock of symptoms, a list that, in its entirety, may well
send an honest man into convulsionary fits of gossip.
[Juan is now holding me at stainless steel knifepoint and
telling me to get out of his Lazy Boy recliner; I’m not in
his Lazy Boy recliner so I don’t know what to tell him.
I record him insidiously. George enters from the garage
smoking a Newport #72 and wearing a bathrobe. His
paunch inflates and deflates, rumbling our consciences,
with each graceless stride. He walks over to Juan and
calmly disarms him. The narrator looks resentful.]
It doesn’t even matter, man. Don’t fuck around so much.
[Juan dismisses the narrator with a gesture unfamiliar to
me (resembles some rare sex act). George’s apathy, his
emptiness, exceeds my own capacity for rendition. He’s
so still, standing at the entrance.]
As I was saying, George and I had grown to become
boyhood friends with stunning alacrity. We driveled away
the hours swinging on the creaky old tire swing that Mr.
Cranson built out by the dew-strewn orchard. The river
would drawl by and we’d be just as happy as two boys
could be! It makes me sigh to mention it, but George
and I one day found a puppy, whom we titled Zoroaster.
That puppy grew into a loathsome suppurating rat of a
she-bitch, always gnashing its teeth. Zoroaster was a
mischievous pup, and accidentally delved into a cave that
emanated rabid heat. I knew that it would be untimely.
He scraped the wet part of his nose, and consequently,
a few days later, squirmed with a parasitical frenzy that
only blood can satiate (or the premium deli meats at the
supermarket, but we didn’t have enough legal tender
32

that week to get any.) That yielded some milk and some
anxiety.

[Juan scents the air, flourishing his grandiose brown

nostrils. He claims that he smells natural gas, as if there’s
a leak somewhere, as if his own intentions had diffused
into the air around him, in a cloud, accumulating to their
critical density, the smallest friction liable to combust
him and his suede belt. He sweats, he yearns. The narrator
speaks on without noticing.]

Zoroaster terrorized us with the threat of socialized health

care, and then eventually bit Mr. Cranson, who, due to
a rarefied blood disease that I’m not patient enough to
go into at the moment, immediately succumbed to the
elusive rabies madness about which we all have such
mixed feelings. George and I teamed up that summer to
eliminate Zoroaster and Mr. Cranson, who’d managed
to establish arcane paramilitary franchises throughout
the region. We deliberated and deliberated. We drew up
graphs, maps, federal agencies and satanic experiments to
test our burgeoning desires. All said, the malefactors died
of natural causes (lightning) before we could exact any of
our brilliant plans.

[George casts a bitter look at the narrator as he cracks

open a dented can of Budweiser and shakes his head.]

I’m sorry, but we’re going to require that you leave

immediately. Sign here and here.

________________________________
investigator #1, nonce chief

________________________________
witness – young, dumb, sunburnt

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 33

A S H L E Y A N D E R S E N  M i n d , B o d y, a n d S o u l
34 LIANA ROUX

Backyard, Hybart Street

We built ourselves nests of pine straw

in the backyard, where we were queens
of hydrangea and all the wild onions
we tore up in green handfuls.
In the summer I liked to drink hose water;
it was warm and sweet
and reminded me of the damp moss
growing musty and soft where the vent
from the clothes dryer breathed
humid air onto the ground,
a thick cloud of earth and decay.
I used to think that yard would remember us,
our weedy gardens and kingdoms. But now,
in leaving, I think we will be more like
the cicada shells we used to find,
delicate as blown glass, bodies
blind and clinging to the pine bark.

BO ZHANG
The Mermaid’s Gift
The best birthday present I ever received was when
I turned seven. Father gave it to me, after he came home
from fishing all day in his little boat out beyond Fishtail
Bay. I remember he got home early that day, when the
sun was still middle-high in the sky. He had caught lots
of tuna, which was good because I loved tuna, especially
when Auntie Eight cooked it, and it sold well, too. He
found me at Auntie Eight’s house, where she was teaching
me how to cook. Auntie Eight’s present was a shiny new
knife so sharp that it could cut the wind, and I had played
with it earlier, waving it around and chopping the air into
little puffy bits, before Auntie Eight came outside with
her hands on her hips and told me that it was not a toy
and I should be using it to practice chopping celery for
her clam and celery soup. That was where Father saw
me, standing at Auntie Eight’s big kitchen table, trying
to chop up celery into inch-long pieces like Auntie Eight
wanted. I wasn’t very good at it yet. Celery was trickier
than air.
“Malee!” Father said from the doorway of Auntie
Eight’s kitchen. He stuck his head in but the rest of his
body stayed outside. Auntie Eight didn’t like anyone with
dirty feet to walk on her clean kitchen floor and Father
hadn’t yet taken off his boots. I didn’t have that problem
because I didn’t wear boots and my feet almost never got
dirty.
“Father!” I said. “You’re back!” I wiped the knife
carefully like Auntie Eight showed me and then set it
down. Then I went to give him a hug, because I always
did that when Father came home from fishing.
He picked me up. “Well, look at you!” he said, giving
me a big bushy smile. Father had a beard that was as dark
as the brown kelp Auntie Eight and I gathered from the
beaches every week but not as long. His smile made his
blue eyes wrinkle up at the corners. I counted five wrinkles
on his left eye and four on his right. Father’s teeth were
just as shiny as his eyes, but I didn’t count those because
I knew he still had all of them, unlike rich Pamela’s father
who had to get all new ones because his old teeth looked
like a termite nest.
“Seven years old already.” Father bobbled me up
35
and down, then spun me around so that I almost got
dizzy. Then he leaned close and whispered in my ear, “Is
my little girl ready for her present?”
I was more than ready. Father had been telling me
all week about my birthday present, except he never really
said what it was. He said that it was a big present and a
little one, that it was a shiny present and a dull one. When
I asked him how big he said as big as the sea and as small
as a shell, and when I asked him how shiny he scratched
his beard and said he didn’t know. Auntie Eight always got
annoyed when Father did this and said that he should just
tell it to me straight, except Father said that would ruin
the fun. Auntie Eight always told things to me straight.
She was in the garden now, trying to make the turnips
grow. That was a hard job because turnips were the most
stubborn vegetables in the whole world and refused to
grow even when you begged really hard on your knees,
only Auntie Eight never did that. She yelled at them a lot,
though, which worked better than begging on your knees.
When Auntie Eight got really mad at Father she yelled at
him a lot too, and called him a turnip. When I got really
mad at Father I called him a cucumber, because that’s the
food he hates most to eat.
Father put me on his boat which was the Grey Lady
III because Grey Lady I and II were at the bottom of the
bay. Father always named his boat the Grey Lady because
he said that it was the luckiest name for a boat he knew,
but Auntie Eight said that was only a joke. Grey Lady the
Third was very pretty. It was as smooth and curved as the
top of a baby’s head but ten times as hard. It never broke
against the rocks at the Eastern end of the bay or scraped
over the reefs, which happened to everybody else at least
a couple of times. But Father was the best fisherman in
the whole village, and he almost never let his boat get
hurt, except for those two times.
Father steered the Grey Lady towards the open sea
while I sat smelling the wind. It was a great smell, salty
and tangy and full of oily fish. Behind me was the whole
village, spread out like a white pebbly crescent against
the edge of the bay. All the houses were white because
it was bad luck to paint a house any other color, but
36
everybody planted lots of flowers to brighten things up. I
could see fire lilies and red gingers and the fishtail-shaped
heliconias that were my favorite. Most of the houses were
clustered together near the center of the bay, around a
long dock that held everyone’s boats. There were only
a few tied there now because everybody was still out
fishing, though a few people were starting to come home.
One man waved at Father when we passed by and Father
waved back.
Our house was at the very tip of the bay, separate
from everybody else except for Auntie Eight, who lived
right next door. I once asked Auntie Eight why our
houses were so far away from everyone else’s, and she said
that it was because she didn’t want any nosy neighbors.
Nosy neighbors were bad things. They poked around
other people’s homes and ate other people’s food without
saying thank you and sometimes took things that weren’t
even their own. Worst of all, they told stories about you to
everyone else, even when they weren’t true. Auntie Eight
told me once that I must never become a nosy neighbor,
and I promised her on my best dress that I wouldn’t.
–––
Father steered the boat far out to sea. We had passed
entirely out of the bay and the island was a medium-sized
green blob of land behind us to the right. The wind was
very light, and the sun was starting to set, which made the
clouds red and pink and gold. The ocean was red and gold,
too, but only on top. If I looked straight down over the
edge of the boat, it was a deep blue color so big and still
that it could swallow up the sky.
Father pulled the oars in and we sat there, floating
in the gold-tipped ocean. He was looking out towards the
sunset and smiling at something. I tried to see what he
was smiling at, but even though my eyes are better than
his all I saw was an albatross that was catching a fish and
pooping at the same time. I didn’t think that was what
made Father so happy though, and I made a huffy noise
to show him that if he was going to give me my present
then he’d better hurry.
Father turned around from where he was looking,
but he still was still smiling like he had just seen the best
thing in the world. “Do you know the story, Malee,” he
said softly, “of how I met your mother?”
“No,” I said. I was surprised. Father never talked
about my mother. Auntie Eight never talked about
Mother, either, except to say that I looked more like her
than like Father. I didn’t think about having a mother
very much. Father took care of me when he was home and
Auntie Eight took care of me when he wasn’t, and that
was a pretty good arrangement from my point of view.
Plus, Auntie Eight showed me stuff that I was pretty sure
no mother would allow her children to know, like how
to make a good luck stew from rabbit ears or a cobweb
necklace that drives away bad thoughts. And nobody else
could make clam stews the way I liked them best.
Father was already talking. “Well, about seven years
ago, on an evening just like this, I met your mother for the
first time. The sun was setting and I was just about ready
to go home, only I was disappointed because that day I
didn’t catch any fish. It was a hard time. Hardly anyone
could catch anything; the seas were nearly empty and no
one knew why. I remember thinking how nice it would be
if a big school would somehow wander by when suddenly
your mother appeared right before me.” Father pointed
at the prow of the boat. “She certainly gave me a scare!”
“Was she in the Grey Lady?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” Father said. “Her head and arms were
in the boat, but the rest of her wasn’t. It was like she
was leaning in over the side with her body in the water.
I didn’t think anybody could swim all the way out here!”
“Me neither!” I said, though I thought I probably
could because I was a very good swimmer. “What did she
look like?”
“Your mother was very beautiful. She had long, pale
arms and slim fingers and lots of dark tangly hair, just
like yours.” He reached over and gave a light tug on one
escaping lock. “It was hard to see much of her face at first,
but when I looked closer I could see that she had lovely
grey eyes and lips as pink as coral. But beautiful as she
was, that wasn’t what caught my attention the most.”
“Really?”
“Well, there was something very important that
your mother was giving me at the time, so I was a little
distracted. She was handing me something, a small bundle

of kelp, shaped like a square purse. Actually, she wasn’t
handing it to me – she was pushing it in my face! She was
very insistent about it.” Father leaned back and gazed up
at the sky. He grinned. “You know, I think she’s where you
get your stubbornness from.”
Father was teasing me, but I didn’t mind because I
had just figured out Father’s surprise. It was quite obvious.
This mysterious bundle from my mother was my birthday
present! I wasn’t sure how exactly it fit the description of
“big as the sea and small as a shell,” but I was sure Father
could explain what he meant.
“Imagine my shock,” Father continued, “when I
opened the bundle and found myself holding a baby! I
nearly dropped you. You started crying immediately, and
as soon as you did your mother made a small noise at the
back of her throat. I don’t know exactly what she said,
but it sounded like ‘Ma-lee. Ma-lee.’ Then she let go of
the Grey Lady and dropped right into the ocean. It was
hard to see, because she was going directly into the sun,
but I thought I saw a big fin and tail moving away very
fast. You were yelling your head off by then, so there was
nothing I could do except take you home with me. Thank
goodness Auntie Eight was there to help me, because I
had absolutely no clue.” Father chuckled. “I can still see
Auntie Eight waggling those three fingers on her right
hand in my face when I arrived on her front step, baby
girl and seaweed in my arms. She insisted that I should
give you a name right away, so I thought about what your
mother had last said and decided on that.”
Father stopped talking and looked over at me.
He was smiling and looked very happy, and I could tell
he wanted me to look happy, too. I stared back at him
with a serious face, only I wasn’t sure if he saw that or
not because the sun was setting behind me and maybe
my face was too dark. Overhead, the stars were coming
out in beautiful bright patches, but I didn’t even look up.
I crossed my arms and kicked my bare feet against the
bottom of the boat, which made a hollow bonking noise.
I felt kind of cheated. The seaweed bag did not have my
birthday gift. It had contained me, and I thought was a
pretty lame idea if father was going to give me myself for
my birthday.
“Is that it?”
37
“Is what it?” Father looked kind of confused. I made
an even more serious face and kicked harder.
“Is that my birthday present? The story?”
“Well, no. That’s one part. Here’s the second part
– maybe you’ll like it better.” Father took something
from his pocket. It looked like an old leather bag, kind
of wrinkled, with a dry, dusty smell like old people’s skin.
There was a big hole in the side. Father reached into the
hole and took out a something small that he carefully
held in his hands. It glinted in the fading light like a tiny
silver star.
“What’s that?” I asked. I leaned closer to Father
to try and get a better look in spite of still acting
disappointed. I stopped kicking, though.
“This,” Father said, “is the second part of your gift.
Hold out your hands.” I cupped my hands and he put the
shiny thing carefully in my palms.
It was a necklace. I dangled it from my fingers and
held it up to see it better. It was made of knotted seaweed
with a real white conch shell in the middle that glittered
and flashed in the sunset. I had never seen a conch shell
of this color. It wasn’t fake white either, like too-shiny
teeth, but a deep glowing color, kind of like Auntie Eight’s
precious bone china plate that she used only for very
special occasions. It was the most beautiful thing I had
ever seen.
“Do you like it?” Father asked, but of course he knew
the answer. I jumped right over to his side, which made
the boat rock and Father grab onto his seat, and gave him
the biggest hug I could. “Thank you, Father!” I put it on
right away and tried to see my reflection over the side. I
couldn’t because of the waves, but I kept trying.
Father smiled a big smile and patted my head. “Now
jump into the water, Maria.”
“What?”
“Quick, before the sun sets all the way. I don’t want
you in the water when it gets dark. Keep the necklace on.
Don’t worry, it won’t get hurt.”
I grinned. This birthday was turning out great! I
loved swimming and never missed a chance to go, if only
because Auntie Eight didn’t like me to do it too much.
She said she couldn’t take care of me in the water like she
could on land, and also she was too old to like getting wet.
38
I stood up, jumped into the ocean and treaded
water. The water was cool but not cold, and it felt good
against my skin. I loosened my hair because it’s always
better to swim with your hair free, though I knew that it
would immediately get tangled and I would have to spend
hours trying to get it back into shape.
“Swim a little, Maria. Put your head underwater.”
Father’s voice carried softly from in the boat. I floated on
my back. He was keeping a close eye on me, but he didn’t
have to worry because I wouldn’t have drifted away.
I took a deep breath and dove down, but not
towards the boat because the bottom of it was kind of
icky. I hadn’t gotten the chance to swim in the open sea
for such a long time. The water felt smooth and cool and
even though my dress weighed me down a little it wasn’t
too bad. There was something warm on my chest though,
and when I opened my eyes to see what it was, I got a big
surprise.
My necklace was glowing! Now it looked even more
like a star. It lit up my whole body and startled a big eel
that was coming over to see if I was something good to eat.
Everything in its light looked silver and blue and sparkly,
even the bits of algae that clotted on the ocean surface.
My hands shone and my hair twirled around in bright
waves. Below I could see sea kelp and coral, all faintly
silver. It looked as if there was a whole moon underwater,
lighting everything up. The eel slid around me once
before deciding that I was too big for a meal. I blew a
few bubbles at it as it glided away, cupped my beautiful
necklace in my hands and laughed with happiness until I
had to come up for air.
–––
Father promised that he would take me out to the
ocean more so I could play with my necklace. I wore it all
the time now and found out lots of things about it. It only
glowed at night, and only in ocean. I had tried to make it
light up by dunking it in the bay to show Auntie Eight,
but that didn’t work. Auntie Eight said that was all right,
but she made me promise, also on my best dress, that I
wouldn’t tell anybody about the necklace or the fact that
my mother was a mermaid. The second part wasn’t hard
to promise, but I really had wanted to show my necklace
off.
Father had been gone for a whole week and wouldn’t
return until the end of the next. That was because he was
on a long fishing trip, the longest of the year. Everybody
went on this fishing trip because it was the time when
the yellow tuna ran in one big school all the way, Father
said, from north where people lived in the sky all the way
down south, where the world ended in ice. It was always
one of the best catches of the year, and it took two weeks
because the run was so far away and there were so many
fish. I had helped Auntie Eight pack up lots of dried meat
and bread for Father to eat on his journey, and lots of
stewed vegetables too, because Auntie Eight’s vegetables
never got bad. She said they were too scared to get bad,
not after she had yelled at them so much.
Everything was fine until two days before Father
and everyone else was supposed to return. Auntie Eight
was making dinner and teaching me how to gut a fish with
my knife when suddenly she looked up and went to the
window. The day was bright and sunny and the sky was
the color of Father’s eyes but Auntie Eight didn’t look
happy.
“The weather’s not right,” she said to me. “Maria, go
into the garden and cover the plants. We’ll finish the fish
after you get back. Hurry, child.”
I ran outside to Auntie Eight’s garden and got the
tarp where it was kept folded in a basket. It was easy to
drape it over all the plants, but it took a long time because
there was a lot to cover. Because we didn’t have neighbors,
Auntie Eight had the biggest garden of anybody in the
village, and the best, too. We had tomatoes when nobody
else did and cabbages even in the winter, and best of all
we had spices the whole year long. Sometimes Auntie
Eight gave away her extra vegetables to the people who
lived in the village, but only if they asked nicely and didn’t
have anything else to eat.
I wasn’t sure what Auntie Eight was talking about
with the weather, but that wasn’t unusual. Auntie Eight
knew lots about the weather and could sense a storm
three miles off, all through her right hand. She said her
joints ached if a storm was coming, and I saw her rubbing
them before I went out to get the tarps, so even if the sky

was the prettiest blue, I knew that there was a big storm
on the way.
It didn’t take long for it to come. Pretty soon after
I put down the tarps the sky changed color to become a
hazy sort of yellow. Auntie Eight went around shutting all
the windows in both Father’s house and hers and made
sure that everything that was outside was brought in. By
the time I finished completely gutting and cleaning my
first fish, the storm was here.
It was a big storm. The water pounded the roof
like a waterfall and the wind thumped the door like
that drunk man who once thought Auntie Eight was his
girlfriend. Even louder than the wind was the lightning,
which crackled in sharp bursts right over our head. I was
glad to be inside, where it was warm and cozy, and even
through three days we had plenty of food. I practiced
gutting three more fish and was getting quite good at it,
though I still couldn’t chop celery right.
The storm didn’t end for three days. And even
though I had fun with Auntie Eight, I was always thinking
about Father and where he was and if he might get home
all right. No one came back during the storm. It was only
when on the fourth day, when the skies finally calmed,
that I saw a few battered boats float by our house. I was
standing at the tip of the bay, waiting for Father and Grey
Lady III. I wasn’t worried like the women in the village
were worried. Father was the best fisherman and he
would never let himself be lost at sea. But I watched for
him anyway.
On the fifth day, Auntie Eight got a visitor. This was
very rare, because for some reason the village people didn’t
like Auntie Eight. They whispered that she was a witch
and had chopped off the fingers of her own right hand to
get the power of controlling weather. Auntie Eight told
me this story herself and gave a loud snort when she did,
because she said she could control weather just as good
with two good hands as with one maimed one – which
she explained meant that she couldn’t – and besides, you
had to have a better reason than just the weather to chop
off your own fingers. This visitor was an old man who
walked with a limp, but a big hat covered his face and I
couldn’t tell who he was. I might have asked Auntie Eight,
except I was still watching for Father. I spent a lot of time
39
watching for him now.
Auntie Eight called me into the house shortly after
the visitor left. It was almost time for dinner, but Auntie
Eight said she wasn’t feeling hungry yet. Instead she sat
me down at the kitchen table and put a big bowl of carrot
and fish soup in front of me, and told me to eat up because
she was going to tell me something straight.
“Malee, did you see the man who came here?” I
nodded. “Well, that was Vasquez.”
I knew about Vasquez. He was an old friend of
Father’s, one of only a few. He and Father sometimes
went fishing together. I blew on my soup and took a sip.
It was salty and thick and very good.
Auntie Eight looked very serious. She said, “Vasquez
was working near your Father when the storm hit. They
were almost the last ones who were still trying to make
a catch. Everyone had seen the signs and most of the
fishermen had already moored their boats at a small
island that was nearby. Vasquez wanted to go, too, but
Fernando still wanted to make a few more catches, and
Vasquez didn’t want to leave him alone. He’s a good man,
Vasquez.”
Auntie Eight watched me carefully as I ate, probably
to make sure that I didn’t choke because I was eating so
fast. The soup was a little too hot and burned my tongue,
but that didn’t stop me.
“The storm came on suddenly, much faster than
Vasquez had thought. The first big gust nearly blew him
away from his boat but he held on. The sky was dark gray
and he could barely see, but – child, are you listening? –
he held on long enough to see Fernando fall off the side
of the Grey Lady and disappear into the sea. He didn’t
come back up. The Grey Lady floated away. He got lucky
because somehow the wind blew him towards the island
and he got stuck in the reefs, but his leg was badly twisted.
Child, I’m sorry.”
Auntie Eight’s voice got a little raspy. I drained my
bowl and set it down. Then I slipped off the chair and
walked outside. I went to the rock where I had sat all
day waiting for Father and watched the sunset. It was
the same sky as that time when Father told me the secret
of my mother and gave me the conch shell necklace. I
gripped it in my hand and listened to the surf until the
40
sky was entirely black. The stars were blazing stronger
than ever, as if making amends for being covered up for
so long. Down in the village, everything was dark and in
mourning. I didn’t mourn, though, because it wasn’t time
yet.
Auntie Eight didn’t call me back into the house,
which was a good thing because it made everything easier.
I waited for the moon to come out before I slipped into
the water, barefoot once again, and silently swam away
towards the ocean. My feet made hardly a splash as I
swam, I was that good.
It got harder outside the bay. The ocean water
was a lot choppier, and the further I got from shore the
stronger the currents pulled. I swam a little and floated a
little, because there was a specific spot I wanted to reach
and it was no good if I was exhausted trying to get there.
It took a lot of shifting to find the right current and once
I even had to do the doggie paddle, but finally I got to the
same place where Father said he met Mother.
I had spent a long time playing with the conch shell
after Father gave it to me. He told me that he thought
it was a tracking device of some sort, so that mother
mermaids could find their children if they ever floated
away by the light. He was right, but that wasn’t all. I
found this out on my own, when I had slipped away from
Auntie Eight and went swimming alone. See, the necklace
wasn’t just used for tracking. There was a reason it was a
conch shell.
I took a deep breath and let myself sink. The conch
shell immediately lit up. I could feel its silvery glow on my
body and face, but I didn’t open my eyes. I lifted it to my
lips and blew.
It wasn’t so much of a sound that came out of the
other end, but something rather like a shudder. I could
feel it moving through my arms and legs and even my hair,
before moving off into the sea. There was a slight, lonely
echo, before everything became silent again, even more
so than before. I shivered a little, and when I opened my
eyes I couldn’t see a single moving thing.
I had to take three whole breaths before my mother
finally came. She swam as silently as a ghost, even quieter
than me when I was trying my best to sneak away from
doing chores. I knew she was my mother because she had
the same dark hair and the same eyes and the same pointy
chin that I did, only her mouth was much bigger and had
pointy sharp teeth. I wondered why Father didn’t talk
about those, because that was the neatest bit about her.
She had a conch shell at her throat that looked exactly
like mine but was slightly bigger.
Mother looked at me with squinty eyes that hardly
had any white in the corners. She didn’t come too close,
which suited me fine because the spines on her arms
looked sharp. I didn’t know what next to do, but then
she made that noise that Father said sounded like “Ma-
lee, Ma-lee,” only it sounded much softer and silkier and
almost like a song.
I held out my hand. She didn’t take it, but a lock of
her hair floated into my palm and I took hold of that. Her
hair was much longer than mine, and it felt slippery, like
wet moss, but I held it tight and asked with a great rush
of bubbles, “Father.”
Mother’s expression didn’t change, and she didn’t
come any closer. I didn’t know if she understood what I
was saying, but I couldn’t ask again because I had to go
up for air. I broke the surface and took a gasping breath
before sinking right down again, but when I did I saw
that Mother was gone. And, I noticed, my necklace was
gone, too.
I swam back to Auntie Eight’s house in the dark,
guided only by memory and faint moonlight. It was much
harder going back than floating out, and when I finally
reached the sandy part of the bay near my house I was
absolutely exhausted. I lay on the sand for a while to rest.
The night was cool but not cold, and it seemed too hard a
job to trudge back to the house, dripping wet, and having
to explain to Auntie Eight why my necklace was gone. So
I just slept.
The morning sun was hot, but that hadn’t woken me
up. Auntie Eight was shaking me and patting caked sand
from my face and crying, all at the same time. “Malee!
Malee!” she was shouting, and then she was pulling me
away from the shore towards her house where a group of
slightly nervous men stood near the front door, holding
something large in a stretcher. Vasquez was with them,
and waving to us. I wiped grit from my eyes runny from
Auntie Eight’s tears and saw what I had hoped to see most
 41

in the world: Father, lying in the stretcher, quite pale but,

Vasquez assured Auntie Eight and me, alive. The men had
found him when they were heading out to sea, lying in the
middle of the dock, starved for water and nearly bloated
from staying in the sea for so long. Auntie Eight took my
hand and we let the men with the stretchers put Father
in bed. I was all streaky from sand and Auntie Eight was
all streaky from tears but neither of us cared. Auntie
Eight said she was going to feed Father as many turnips
as he could hold as punishment for making us worry for
so long, but I said that we should feed him cucumbers
instead. We looked at each other and at then poor Father
and just laughed and laughed because he was back again.

r
42

LARISSA KAUL  Erin

 43
G R AC E M ACN A I R

Wa s h i n g S i l v e r

I IV
I wash the silver still warm
from breakfast. All stabbing,
tarnished, it piles the sink like
dead minnows. Even the soap
surrounding serrated knifes
and blunt flippers of spoons
seems marine so I sprinkle
salt into the sink.
II
They might become mine someday,
if I marry. They would come to me
neatly, sunken deeply into the velvet
of a mahogany box. I would lift them
from their plush graves for company
and holidays and maybe ask my daughter
to polish their small skeletons bone-bright
and then take pleasure in the pride
the request shoots through her small self.
He serves them with breakfast lunch and dinner;
steals spoons to prep the garden soil; drags forks
through his horse’s mane. He spreads them like hot
coals to keep the loss from burning through the box.
V
If they become mine someday I will bend
spoons into rings for my fingers; pound forks
flat and tie them with fishing line to
the backbone of wind chimes; slash trenches
for spinach with thin knives. I will take them
in their burning box to the sea, use a serving
spoon to paddle myself out farther than I can
see and send them one by one twirling
into the ocean away from him, away from me.

III
They might become mine someday if there are
any left unbroken, un-lost, not washed until the
silver peels off like salted slug skin under my
father’s hands, into the sink he helped bathe all
five of us in. He changed the silver’s status from
ceremonial to every day when, after twenty years
trying, he buried his marriage in a court built coffin.
To keep silver for special occasions – when children
come home only half the time, missing half
their creator; when the left side of your bed is slowly
un-denting, arching away from the memory of who,
of what was made there – is like being in a no-touch
store where the currency required belongs to a country
whose flag has fallen, whose land has been divided, whose
people have been sent into hiding. And so holding in your eyes
what cannot be bought or even fought for only whittles hurt sharper.
44
DORUK ONVURAL
Coming Home
There’s so much space here. It’s so composed
the emptiness is intensified. It’s as if you were walking
through one of those fake towns built in the sixties to
test nuclear bombs and radiation, where the walls in the
houses are hollow plaster and life-size Barbie and Ken
dolls sit at dining room tables with immaculate smiles or
stand by kitchen counters clutching empty coffee mugs,
and, hell, somebody somewhere had a twisted sense of
humor, so there’s one guy sitting on a toilet that has no
water in the bowl with his pants around his ankles reading
a newspaper with the headline, End of the World: Sox Win
the World Series; but there are no sounds or noises of any
kind really, except when the wind picks up and tickles the
chimes on the front porch. You walk past the gas station
and the ice cream parlor and there, on the corner, is the
grocery store where you tried to steal a stick of gum but
got caught and your mom gave you three licks on your
backside but didn’t tell dad because she loved you and
knew he had just bought a silver belt buckle that looked
like a cattle prod and he was just dying to use it; and just
a little further down the street is the fountain that marks
the entrance to your neighborhood: a true Levittown,
where the houses are the same design inside and out, with
the same plain garden and the same lame driveway and
all those black lamp posts in the lawn that shine at night
like a runway, though you knew nobody would ever want
to land here; but you peek past the corner of the gray
cardboard box that you think is yours and sure enough,
there’s the old dog house, and you remember you used
to be small enough to crawl inside and sleep with Buster
when the summer heat would rest like a blanket over the
town, and you would try as hard as you could, but all you
could make out in the night sky was the Big Dipper. But
there was just one problem: there was no Buster and,
come to think of it, there was nobody down at the gas
station either and that’s when you realize that you’re the
only one in this whole place, and all the memories, the
ones that make you laugh and the ones that make you
cry and the ones that make you laugh and cry, they’re all
holding you back. You realize that you’ve got to get out
of this place and never look back, but as you’re trying to
remember how you got here you notice a chain and you
think, that wasn’t there before was it, but it was, and you
don’t understand why you didn’t see it before, and what is
it doing here in the first place, but you don’t stop to ask
yourself the most important question: who’s attached to
the other end, and that’s when you see Buster sitting on
the lawn, staring at you with his tongue hanging out and
his tail swinging back and forth as if it was attached to a
motor. Somehow he must have survived, but there were
no people and no food and if you stayed with him you
were sure to die, so you scratched his ear just the way he
liked and told him you’d be back with some bolt cutters
to set him free, but how could you come back to this
place after everything that’s happened? But you had to.
You have to. So you give him a kiss on the spot between
his ears and start to walk away and when you’re at the end
of the driveway he gives one last yelp and you know he’s
just sitting there, smiling and drooling on himself like an
idiot, but it’s like he knows what’s really on your mind,
that you’re never going to come back and that you’ll never
see him again, so you tell yourself keep walking, don’ look
back, but you can’t help it, so you turn around and there
he is, tail still spinning and tongue still dripping, and you
think he’s just the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen
and you feel like your heart is going to burst if you don’t
run back and hold him in your arms, but you have to go
on, you have to keep moving even though all you want
to do is pull your hair out and scream until your lungs
burn, so you end up falling to your knees and you can’t
get up, not to go to Buster and not for yourself either;
you just lay there in the fetal position crying dry tears on
the picture perfect lawn while Buster retreats and turns
the other corner of the house where the whole town’s
gathered for a picnic and the cashier that works at the
grocery store, the one that got you in trouble, bends over
and scratches his ear just the way he likes and asks him,
in that condescending voice we all use with babies and
animals, where he’s been hiding.
R
 45
D AV I D H U T C H E S O N

Tr a p S h o p p i n g

Expecting only old-school traps, spring-loaded,

simple, and cheap, I was overwhelmed with options
of how to kill, how much to pay to kill.
Scanning along the yellow packaging:
bait trays, bait pellets, flat traps, glue traps, place packs,
Kills Mice Instantly – the most expensive.
A fancy plastic trap from a company
that has been Killing Rodents For 50 Years,
their logo a huge red thunderbolt smiting
a mouse rolled belly-up – just what you want
to see when you’ve been cleaning mouse shit up.
No View, No Touch, No Mess. “Simply dispose
of the entire trap.” Like a hockey puck,
a windowless cylinder that I’m supposed
to “bait with cheese or peanut butter” to lure
the little guy that I’ve procrastinated
killing because not only is he cute,
he has a zeal for food that I respect,
a zeal for finding, eating, and if the trash
is empty, foraging into the den
until he sees me see him and stops dead,
poised as the cartoon mouse on the d-Con package
sniffing the entrance of the tunnel trap,
ears back, wet nose brushing the edge of mouse
eternity, whatever that might be.
46
LIANA ROUX

The Piccadil l y Line to Russel l Square

We stare across at our reflections blurred

and juxtaposed with shades of travelers
seen waiting through the window for the train
and, beyond, the platform dim and melting
to black and pipes and rush of heated air.
We sit and read the advertisements—meet
your man and cure your infertility
and ride to Paris for forty-nine pounds—
when all at once, the darkness opens up
to day, to clothes strung up behind a house,
a garden spilling lanky rosebushes
and yellow plastic toys, clay flowerpots,
a narrow wall, and then the light snuffs out:
our faces framed in white and red stare back
surprised, as though embarrassed to have been
caught staring at the briefest hint of lace
glimpsed through an open kitchen windowpane,
a curtain swaying slightly in the wind.
 

PETER PENDERGRASS
the spider in my bedroom
there is a spider living in my bedroom. i know this because
we crossed paths this afternoon. i think it was a surprise
for both of us – i know it was for me – but i can’t tell
for sure how the spider felt. i walked into my room to
grab a book, or my keys, or something like that – i don’t
remember – and there she was. well, i assume it was a she,
i didn’t ask. there’s something that’s just awkward about
asking someone whether they’re a boy or a girl. i mean,
not for me personally, but some people are offended by
the question.
at first i didn’t notice her. i turned around and walked out
of the room, but then i thought to myself, “i don’t recall
there being three push-pins in that wall,” so i turned
around to take a closer look. indeed, there were two push
pins and a spider. we just stared at each other, neither
quite sure what to say, hoping the other was not real or
would just go away without having to be asked, or both.
the spider was black, about the size of a dime, with some
white parts, and kind of bulky, as if the front legs were
swollen.
i can’t remember who broke the silence. i think we both
decided to acknowledge the idiocy of our mutual denial
of each other’s presence in the same moment. the spider
said something about not being sure if anyone was in the
house, and that she had been taken entirely by surprise. i
apologized for catching her off guard, hoping that i hadn’t
scared her, realizing immediately afterwards that i needn’t
be making apologies. it is, after all, my own bedroom. the
spider said not to worry about her, she wasn’t frightened
at all. i asked her how long she’d been living here. she said
that she couldn’t recall exactly, but not an extraordinarily
short while.
for a time, neither of us said anything. i was trying to
figure out the best way to deal with this invasion of my
personal space, while putting an equal amount of effort
into keeping myself composed. i think the spider was
mostly annoyed by the fact that she had been found out.
every few seconds she would sigh, as if to say, really? not
47
knowing what to say or do, i invited the spider to lunch,
which i had been preparing downstairs.
“there are some dead flies on the windowsill that you’re
welcome to. …or if you prefer a tomato sandwich?”
the spider hastily declined, remarking almost snidely that
she’d never eat anything that she didn’t kill herself. i didn’t
know exactly how to respond, but i became very angry
very quickly. it was as if i had been directly threatened.
how dare she invade my home and then decline my
invitation! i’d even prepared rose hip tea and blueberry
tarts for dessert! it would be nice, something we could
do together. i hated that spider. i wanted to kill her, and
i think she could feel my vicious intent. the spider said
nothing, and had yet to move. i stared at her, visualized
the shoe laying in the corner of my room crushing her
tiny exoskeleton and her pulverized remains falling to the
floor. i looked hard at the spider, my rage overwhelming.
after a few seconds my rage turned to exasperation,
then to resentment, then to sadness, and finally to some
combination of indifference and pity. then, in a moment
of frustrated benevolence, i turned and walked straight
out of the room.
i went downstairs to enjoy my lunch, and for a while i
forgot all about the spider. i went to a café where i checked
my e-mail very thoroughly, finished reading a book, and
drank two cups of coffee. later on, i went to a friend’s
house, and we sat outside listening to a mixture of night
sounds and news radio, and enjoyed a nice smoke. when
i returned home, i took a shower, and then i sat on my
bed to dry off, and that’s when i remembered the spider. i
looked over to the wall beside me, but she was gone.
r
48 D AV I D H U T C H E S O N

Out in Arizona

Even the clouds are bigger there,

or is it just that the landscape
seems so full of nothing the sky
is reaching down to it?

The picture you sent me

from your phone is so small
the clouds’ curves
look less like

the imaginary machines

we saw when we were little,
riding in the van to church,
and more like the ones God sits on

in the 3x5
Creation reproduction
in my 9th grade history book.
Huge, diminutive.
The bridge of light from where God
would be is pointing
directly at your head.
You have been targeted for redemption.

The desert rehab is expensive,

but the clouds are parting for you
like the two flaps of our father’s wallet,
and anyway they have basketball

and horseback riding to help you

back up on the wagon.
Seeing you there on the old
new frontier between the freeway

and a twenty-five-foot cactus,

I can’t help but billow up the wisps
clouding the atmosphere above your head.
Standing in the middle of it, you look so
small.

ARIEL RUDOLPH
I ’ d Wa n t t o K n o w
This morning I watched you get dressed, but
pretended to be asleep. I’ve always done this, but now
it seems more sacred, more necessary. You eased out of
bed as always, moving only one limb at a time so as not
to disturb me. And as always, I woke up, but lay quietly
in the same position, turning my head a little to the side
to see you in the mirror next to your closet. You’ve never
known what a light sleeper I am, and hopefully never will.
When Jenna was a baby, I would wake every time you
woke to comfort or feed her, but most of the time, I lay
still.
After treatments, when you would get up sick in the
middle of the night, I would always wake. At first I got
up with you, but that irritated you. I tried once to hold
your hair back as you sat shivering and sick in front of the
toilet, but you batted my hands away. “I don’t need help,”
you said. “Go back to bed.” You glistened with sweat, and
your skin was sallow in the yellow light of the bathroom.
I lay in bed with my eyes shut until you came out, when
you kissed my temple and whispered, “I’m sorry,” in my
ear. I didn’t open my eyes.
Even in the worst of the chemo, when you couldn’t
keep anything down but saltines, you would take long
walks by yourself. You changed into athletic clothing,
making a big show of it. “I’m going to go exercise,” you
would yell from the hall, slamming the front door behind
you. You came back pale and sweating, your legs shaking.
One day, it gave you stomach cramps so violent that you
sat doubled over on the first porch step, teeth gritted.
“It’s funny how they say, ‘She lost her battle with cancer.’
Like you could challenge cancer to a duel or something,”
you said between gasps. “If I could do that, I’d kill that
son-of-a-bitch.”
This morning, you shrugged out of bed and I lay
looking at you through half-closed eyelids. You pulled off
your nightgown, folded it, and placed it in your drawer.
Then you pulled off your underwear and put them in
the hamper. You fastened your mother’s locket around
your neck and then stood, naked except for the necklace,
looking at yourself in the mirror and running your hands
down your arms, breasts, stomach, thighs. I’ve decided
49
to memorize one thing about you everyday, and today, it
was that you put on your jewelry before you put on your
clothes. You stood that way a long time, as if charting
your body, hanging on to it.
You’ve never been one to hang on to things. When
we traded in your first car, you didn’t have the nostalgia
for it that I had. You didn’t have to sit in it one last time,
remembering when we had first started dating and would
kiss at red lights until they turned green, and then pull up
fast to the next light and start kissing again. You emptied
the glove box and checked the trunk, and that was it.
“Just let the damn thing go,” you said as I sat inside it. “It
wasn’t even your car.” You turned to the salesman. “I’m
sure you know how men get about their cars,” you said.
Horsing around, you kicked a tire, hard. He looked away,
embarrassed by us both.
The other morning, you rose even before the sun.
Though it was cold outside, you opened the window and
stuck your head out, taking deep, long breaths. You did
this until the cat walked in. You stroked her and held
her up to see outside. You quoted a Robert Frost poem
in a whisper. “O hushed October morning mild, thy
leaves have ripened to the fall; tomorrow’s wind, if it be
wild, should waste them all.” The cat squirmed in your
hands and you dropped her unceremoniously. “Stupid
fuzzbrain,” you said. “Can’t enjoy fine literature.” You
stood at the window and finished quoting the poem under
your breath. “For the grapes’ sake, if they were all, whose
leaves already are burnt with frost, whose clustered fruit
must else be lost—for the grapes’ sake along the wall.”
The first thing you asked me to get when you began
treatment was poetry. You were never without a volume.
“Just get me the collected poems of everybody,” you said
when I told you I was going to the library. “I want to read
them all.” You liked the thick dusty tomes and the tiny
books with gilded edges and ribbon bookmarks. You read
poetry when you couldn’t sleep, and I would nod off to
you flipping pages and whispering one fascinating word
to yourself softly. “Susurrus. Susurrus. Susurrus.” Right
now you are reading Sylvia Plath. “If the cancer doesn’t
kill me first, this woman will,” you told me, pretending to
50
thrust a knife into your gut.
I had gone to bed and you were up reading one
night, when you sat up bolt upright and jarred me out of
sleep. In your hand was a book of Chinese proverbs, no
bigger than a pack of cards. Its cover was hand-painted
with pink flowers and calligraphy, and it smelled earthy
with age, even from where I lay. “Though a tree grow
one thousand feet, the fruits will fall to earth again,” you
quoted. You looked pleased and satisfied, as if you’d just
eaten a fine chocolate. I memorized your contented face.
“Something else, isn’t it?” you said, turning off the light.
I came home last Friday to find that you had given
away most of your clothes and books. “It was time to let
them go,” you said, packing a box with Reader’s Digest
guides on painting and carpentry, which you never got
around to learning. The bookcases were now half-empty,
the way our real estate agent had told us to keep them
when we were selling our first house. Your closet was stark
and impersonal, like a closet out of a Parade of Homes
advertisement. I looked for more boxes. “I already took
them to Goodwill,” you said. “And what were you going
to do with my clothes, anyway? Wear them?” I rushed
to Goodwill and bought everything of yours that I could
find. Back at home, I spread them around me in a circle,
almost trembling with how close I’d come to losing these
last remnants of your life.
On Monday, I sat at your desk to pay the bills. The
desk was bare, except for a single pencil in a metal cup
and a handsome fountain pen, passed down to you by
your grandfather. I hefted the pen, mimicked signing my
name on the top of the desk. A calendar hung on the wall
to my left. Instead of crossing off each day with an X,
you had instead snipped each day away with scissors as
it passed. I opened the desk drawer. The planner inside
began with Monday’s date; each page before it had been
ripped out. I memorized this about you. You wanted all
of time in front of you, and nothing behind.
Two days ago, you rose and stood in the shaft of
morning light that glimmered across the wood floor. You
turned to the bed and looked at me, so I shut my eyes.
When I opened them, you were still looking at me, so I
shut them again and rolled over to cover myself. Every
night, you would joke, “Farewell, this might be the last
time I ever see you again,” before we went to sleep. But
the way you looked at me then was intent and sad, as if
you thought that day really was your last. You must have
stood there watching me for fifteen minutes, completely
silent and still, until you finally walked to the closet to get
dressed.
Last Tuesday, I came back and found a suit and
skirt set I’d never seen arranged on top of the quilt, your
favorite earrings, a necklace, even pantyhose laid across
your side of the bed as if you’d simply vaporized and left
your things behind. You stepped out of the closet with a
pair of shoes and laid them at the foot of the bed. It was
only then that I realized what you were doing. “This is
what I want to be buried in,” you said. We stood shoulder
to shoulder looking at it. I put my arm around you.
A wig was on the bedpost, and you reached out and
took it. You didn’t wear them anymore, but after chemo,
you bought this one online to shock people. It was bright
pink. You put it at the head of the ensemble. “This very
outfit,” you said, giving me a grave stare. “Promise me.”
“If that’s what you want,” I said.
You burst out laughing, picked up the wig and
snapped its elastic around my head. I didn’t laugh, but I
hugged you when you put your arms around me. I rubbed
my cheek against your forehead, and you stroked my back.
You tipped your head and whispered in my ear. “Promise
me you won’t be this miserable after I’m dead. Let’s get
the weepy stuff out now and move on, okay?” You traced
my cheekbones with your thumbs, ran your fingers across
my brow line, my jaw, my chin. “Oh, God,” you said, and
pressed your face into my chest. We held each other that
way for a long time.
On Thursday, I memorized the story you love to
tell about our third date, when we went to the zoo and a
toucan in the aviary pooped on your head. I pulled off my
shirt and offered it to you as a rag. I’ve heard that story
at least a hundred times. You’ve told it to me, you’ve told
it to relatives, you’ve told it to friends. But it seemed new
somehow, and I noted how you always say, “You know
what he did?” with the same sort of wide-eyed amazement
as if it had happened yesterday, and not twenty-one years
ago. The day before that, it was the fact that you pour a
tiny bit of whole milk into your coffee, but you use two-
 51

percent in your cereal. That seems silly, but if someone

were to ask, I’d want to know. I want to know everything,
be able to draw a map of every freckle on your face.
“How long would it take you to remarry?” you asked
me one day, as we sat at the counter drinking tea. I gave
you a baffled stare. “I mean, if you found the right woman
and all. Times like these, women and casseroles come out
of the woodwork.”
“I don’t know.” I said. “Ten years?”
“Oh, come on,” you said.
“Five?” I said, only because I knew you wanted me
to. I don’t think I could. I’d be looking for someone who
folds shirts the way you do, who recites poetry at open
windows, who would meet death wearing a pink wig. I’d
be looking for you.

r
52

J E S S I C A K E N N E DY  He r e , No w
 53

CONTRIBUTORS

A S H L E Y A N D E R S E N is a junior English major D O R U K O N V U R A L is a senior Philosophy major

and Creative Writing minor from Salem, Oregon. from Cary, North Carolina.

A L L I S O N B A I L E Y is a senior Studio Art and Asian P E T E R P E N D E R G R A S S is a senior Studio Art

Studies double-major from Shelby, North Carolina.
M A T T B O U L E T T E is a sophomore English major
from Greensboro, North Carolina.
N O A H D E H M E R is a senior English major and
Creative Writing minor from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
J A N E H A L L is a sophomore Elementary Arts
Education major from Charlotte, North Carolina.
R E B E C C A H O L M E S is a senior Physics major and
Creative Writing minor from Washington D.C.
and Communications double-major from Greensboro, North
Carolina.
E V A N R O S E is a Classics and Economics double-major
from New York, New York.
L I A N A R O U X is a junior English and Anthropology
double-major and Creative Writing minor from Fayetteville,
North Carolina.
A R I E L R U D O L P H is a senior Studio Art major
and Creative Writing and Graphic Design double-minor from
Asheville, North Carolina.

S A R A H H U E N E R is a junior English major and A . R E E S S W E E N E Y - T A Y L O R is a senior

Creative Writing and Music double-minor from Greenville,
North Carolina.
D A V I D H U T C H E S O N is a senior English major
and Creative Writing minor from Rocky Mount, North
Carolina.
K A T H E R I N E I N D E R M A U R is a senior
English major and Creative Writing minor from Raleigh,
North Carolina.
M E R E D I T H J O N E S is a first-year History major
from High Point, NC.
Russian literature major from Groton, Massachusetts.
M I C H E L A W A G N E R is a sophomore Studio Art
and English double-major and Creative Writing minor from
Chicago, Illinois.
J O N A T H A N Y O U N G is a senior Photojournalism
major from Charlotte, North Carolina.
B O Z H A N G is a senior Biology major and Chemistry
and Creative Writing double-minor from Chapel Hill, North
Carolina.

L A R I S S A K A U L is a senior Studio Art and

Communications double-major and Social and Economic
Justice minor from Wilmington, North Carolina.

J E S S I C A K E N N E D Y is a sophomore Journalism
major and French minor from Boone, North Carolina.

G R A C E M A C N A I R is a senior Interdisciplinary
major and Creative Writing minor from Fairview, North
Carolina.

J O S E P H I N E M C C R A N N is a senior Studio
Art and Anthropology double-major from Pinehurst, North
Carolina.
54
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CELLAR DOOR

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 55
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