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ALL THE NAMES WE HAVE TO HAVE FOR LOVE by Lei Wang

April 22, 2025

Someone saw some cloudsonce upon a time. So what?I can see them, too —a haiku But better to have seen them a thousand years ago. I am not being sentimental. I like plumbing as much as anyone, and I know the more pollution, the more brilliant sunsets. But the first poems, you could write about anything. Day turning into night a real phenomenon, a mouth and another mouth. The first poems had no metaphors because nothing was like anything else yet.The kiss was a courting ritual involving, what else, food. A capybara feeding a berry to another capybara, baby birds, wolves translating deer. The first kisses were a promise of future fish, future strawberries: they were symbols, poems. What we want are practical morsels. Let’s nourish the fuck out of each other, a lover says. Hungry, we say, for anything we desire.The first poems were reports. The world was new and you only wanted to factcheck what you saw: are clouds white to you? White as pillowcases? White as teeth? Does billow mean the same to you as to me? How does a frog go? Is the sea far away or no distance at all? Does the moon look sad to you tonight as well? And every night?Why are there so many nature poems? I asked an English professor once. Well, there are just as many city poems, she said. She meant: you see what you want to see.The painters in the caves at Lascaux were saying, bison exist bison exist. Not nostalgizing or vision boarding: just stating the facts. Once upon a time, the facts were enough.

PARENTHETICAL by J. A Gullickson

April 21, 2025

The floor-to-ceiling windows let in so much light that the office is sweltering. Before the sun emerges from behind the tree line, the HVAC system will turn on. These brisk breaths signal the start of a new day for the company. Graham cycles through the presentation again, sinking deeper into his chair. Each slide features a corporate incantation coldly justifying decisions few care for. Key stakeholders have already made up their minds. This is only a formality.In the center of the cube farm lives Hannah. She stares blankly at the two screens in front of her, cursor gliding back and forth between them. The monitors exist separately, but within the technological sinew is a bridge which allows digital matter to travel between them.Here is Peter, some steps away, behind a closed door. Its frosted glass turns men into shapes from another place. He paces back and forth, waiting for the call. This urgency keeps the machine going.In seven years’ time, Graham will run Creative Services. Nine years from now, in Q2, Hannah will be promoted to SVP of Strategy. Peter will give the company over two decades of his life, eventually becoming Chief Technological Officer, before having an aneurysm at his desk late one Friday evening. He won’t be found until the following Monday morning.They will spend more of their lifetime with the company than their own families. That is to be expected. They owe it to the company who grants them paid time off, who provides them the means to pay for medicine, who needs the drones to exist. Graham and Hannah and Peter are just some of the thousands of employees who put in over 40 hours a week for the good of the company. Their roles are utterly meaningless. They’re all in this together. They’re like a family, after all.The drones don’t know the disease festering within. It started ten weeks ago. A group of kings in department store suits, who are seldom seen by their subjects, committed the unthinkable. At their roundtable, tucked away in the cavernous complex of the company, a meeting was held announcing the purported invasion and takeover of their rival Grant Holdings’ shining star: Parenthetical. The lifeblood of the portfolio, Parenthetical is a SaaS titan with a staggering 73% market share in the programmatic space. AdAge calls it “the last omnichannel platform the industry will ever need”.In Q4, a press release announcing the future of Parenthetical will be blasted out to relevant media outlets. The process begins here. The press release will be written by copywriter Felicia K. and will then be delivered to her creative manager, then submitted to the proofreading vendor, then returned to her creative manager, then reassigned to Felicia K. for edits, then delivered to her creative manager, then resubmitted to the proofreading vendor, then returned to her creative manager, then reviewed by her creative manager, then delivered to the creative director, then approved by the creative director, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer, then returned to the creative director with massive edits, then rewritten by the creative director, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer, then approved by the Chief Creative Officer, then submitted to Compliance for approval, then returned to the Chief Creative Officer with some light edits, then reassigned to the creative director with light edits, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer with revisions, then approved by the Chief Creative Officer, then approved by Compliance, and then submitted to the Board, then it is approved, then it is sent to the public relations agency Stealth in Chicago to be released on Tuesday at 10AM Eastern Standard Time. This is the process. It does not forgive. Felicia K. will not recognize her work when she sees the news on CNN’s homepage. She’ll send a link of the article to Hannah on Microsoft Teams. She’ll tell Hannah she thought she wrote something else entirely. The process always transforms what it receives. At the time of its acquisition, Parenthetical employed close to 800 employees across the country with off-shore teams in the Philippines and India. This does not account for the unknown number of contractors currently working for Parenthetical, whose engagements span from a number of months to several years. The loaded gun Felicia K. thought she wrote would be the start of the swift and merciless gutting. The calendar invite is a death sentence. The words “All Hands Meeting” careens into inboxes companywide. A hushed chorus of uncertainty begins to throb.The impending restructuring awakes something. From the darkest depths of legal teams, parent companies, and non-disclosure agreements, a cruelty is set into motion. It will infect the workforce that once drove Parenthetical. Operations will reorganize. Departments will realign. Generations will cease. Bloodlines will end.The Parenthetical US IT team will unfortunately not be part of the migration. Once the merger is complete, they will be let go with a respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. Two months following the announcement, former Parenthetical Network Architect Reggie C. will get a flat tire while driving to the second round of a job interview, then get hit by a car, then be paralyzed from the neck down for the next 19 years, then, at 58, he will purposefully drive his motorized wheelchair hard enough into the corner of the kitchen counter to split his forehead open. He does this while his wife, Terri, is getting groceries two miles away. He will continue to drive his head into the corner of the kitchen counter until he loses consciousness, then bleed out before Terri returns home. A year and a half after being laid off, former Parenthetical Senior Systems Analyst Erin M. will wrap her minivan around a mighty sycamore .6 miles from her home, then the impact of the collision will cause her daughter’s car seat to fail, then, as Erin slips into a warm endless sleep, she will try to take the glass out of her motionless daughter’s hair.Parenthetical grants its clients access to premium advertising channels, leveraging their catalog of quality inventory from over 170 supply partners to achieve campaign objectives effectively. Clients can harness the transformative power of Parenthetical’s in-platform AI optimization for their ad groups. Users can boost CPMs on top-performing inventory, trim underperforming inventory, and strategically direct spend in real time to their chosen KPIs. Enabled across ten dimensions, Parenthetical’s AI optimization, known as Parrot, revolutionizes efficiency across channels and audiences and unleashes the potential of Parenthetical’s optimization engine for a revamped advertising strategy.The Parenthetical marketing team is let go immediately. They receive a respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. Two years after being laid off, former Parenthetical Marketing Manager Braam C. will become a family annihilator, then extended family members will be on the local news talking about how “there were signs” and how “we should’ve listened.” Six years after this, his life and crimes become the fodder of a bonus episode of a murder podcast for subscribers who pay $5 a month. Former Parenthetical Paid Media Analyst Keiko W. is approached by a headhunter on behalf of Henkel North American Consumer Goods, then is hired to work on the Persil laundry detergent marketing team, then Keiko W. develops acuphagia, a form of pica, then she chokes on a clear thumbtack in her car in the office parking lot. Former Parenthetical Social Media Manager Kevin A. marries his fiancé, Liam, two weeks after being laid off, then the newlyweds take advantage of Kevin A.’s newfound freedom from the workforce and plan a last-minute trip to South Africa as an impromptu honeymoon, then Kevin A. is mauled to death by a Boerboel in an alley while waiting for Liam to finish purchasing fruit from a vendor. Parenthetical bridges the gap between modern marketers and the advanced advertising tech required in today’s dynamic media landscape. It is a proverbial gateway to advertising across top DSP platforms like The Trade Desk, Amazon, and more. Clients can manage campaigns across various channels and devices easily and at their convenience. Clients can elevate their marketing strategies with Parenthetical’s suite of audience-targeting solutions. Digital marketers can benefit from first-party data onboarding, tap into cutting-edge third-party targeting tools, implement precision ABM targeting, and explore a wide array of tailored options. Parenthetical’s award-winning customer service teams playfully boast they are available twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week.The Parenthetical accounts team never stand a chance. They do, however, receive a very respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. In the weeks following her termination, Former Parenthetical Client Success Manager Aubrey E. hires Ji Hwang on Fiverr to perform a resume audit and will quickly discover many of her skills are non-transferable. She still doesn’t have a job 18 months later. She will write one final note that will be added to her connection request on LinkedIn to Senior Recruiter Craig Motton at King Global Staffing Solutions which will read I think I’m done trying now. Cheers! Officer Wilmer Brusch will find her in her apartment bathtub four days later after a wellness check is called in, and Officer Brusch will find she sliced into the interior of her left forearm so deep the knife was stuck in her radius.Parker, Thomas & Associates has an ambitious goal for their client, Therapan: increase online sales by a minimum of 50% within two years. To achieve this, the focus must extend beyond mere visibility to a comprehensive strategy encompassing a broad range of online tactics. Target audiences were meticulously identified based on product categories. This involved a strategic blend of first-party and third-party data to formulate effective targeting strategies. A multifaceted targeting strategy unfolded, incorporating behavioral, retargeting, and contextual targeting. Specific campaigns and creatives were tailored to diverse promotions, strategically boosting sales across different product categories. Despite constituting only 3-5% of the monthly visitor traffic, the traffic driven to the site through the campaign substantially impacted 25-50% of online sales. The Return on Advertising Spend, or ROA for the uninitiated, ranged from 5x to 20x– a testament to the efficiency of the strategy. This outcome was attributed to collecting user data via the Parenthetical Smart Container Tag, consolidating insights from all website visitors driven by various media sources. The online revenue saw a 65% increase over the two-year advertising period, surpassing the initial goal of a 50% boost. This success has paved the way for future expansions, with plans to set even more ambitious goals in the upcoming years. The surge in demand prompted the expansion of the factory’s production to three shifts, underscoring the tangible impact of the advertising efforts on Therapan’s overall business operations.In 1999, Fred Gunnar was a Senior Account Representative at Jones Intercable, based in Georgetown, Colorado. During his 12 years with the company, Fred Gunnar accrued several thousand shares of company stock as part of his elected compensation package. The Comcast Corporation acquired Jones Intercable in 1999. Fred Gunnar received a large lump sum for his shares on top of a respectable (16-weeks’ pay) severance package. Fred Gunnar left Colorado shortly after Jones Intercable was acquired by The Comcast Corporation. Fred Gunnar has not worked in over 25 years. Fred Gunnar is a proud grandfather.The most disturbing aspect of this plague is how indiscriminately it kills. Parenthetical employees believed in their work. They reveled in the chance to become storied titans in the industry. With one indifferent sigh and slash of a pen, everything becomes small. So many creative sprints, workshops, one on ones—insignificant. So goes the acquisition ritual which pumps red through the beating heart of America.It takes 17 weeks for Parenthetical to be completely absorbed. Upon acquisition, Former Chief Executive Officer Martin P. receives a respectable (104-weeks’ pay) contract payout package and then Gold Private Equity offers Martin P. a fractional Chief Marketing Officer role at HanWool Corporation’s English speaking satellite office in Berlin. Former Chief Operating Officer Michael L. receives a respectable (208-weeks’ pay) payout and then retires. He is currently exploring the pharmaceutical industry after gaining interest in the Actiq Lollipop, a delivery device for fentanyl which combines the pain reliever with fillers and sweeteners. After developing diabetes in his mid-forties, Michael L. is interested in developing a sugar-free version. Former Chief Marketing Officer Elias N. receives a respectable (104-weeks’ pay) payout, takes a contract Chief Marketing Officer role with MullenLowe Group and advises the leadership team of both MediaHub and MullenLowe Profero.Graham, Hannah, and Peter don’t have much to say about Parenthetical. Graham is swamped this week. The brainstorming meeting for a holiday campaign was less than fruitful and really set him behind. Hannah needs to finish that deck about last month’s paid digital campaigns. The A/B testing yielded some rather interesting results that the strategy team should see sooner rather than later. Peter has a wedding he’s going to this weekend. He has a blinding headache right now, though. The floor-to-ceiling windows stand like monoliths after sunset. The HVAC system breathes its last breath at 7PM. The air in the office will slowly become stale and acrid over the next two days. On Monday, someone will cry in the handicap bathroom stall and everyone will pretend they don’t hear anything. Maybe a glass of water will help.

DO THESE BOOKS MAKE ME LOOK WEIRD?: JACK SKELLEY RECOMMENDS

April 15, 2025

Madison Murray, My Gaping Masshole (Self-published, 2025)A tart is born: Announcing Madison Murray’s fiction, poems, collages. The collection is replete with references to Boston (especially North Shore, Massachusetts). You know, Dunkin Donuts, clam chowdah, the Red Sox Big Green Monstah, Paul Revere, etc. My Gaping Masshole is one unholy, whole, big-ass jam on the concept. Murray’s lewd charm stains every page. My fave parts are Murray’s stories, with real laff-per-paragraph settings, characters, dialog. Of today’s several new writers who are also sex workers (or sex worker-adjacent), Murray is the raunchiest… and funniest.The geo-specificity reminds me of this essential William Blake riff from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.” (Italics mine.) Not “genius” in the sense of Einstein (although that fits). But in the sense of the human imagination embodied in every locale. Every writer does this to a degree. I know I never cease the love-hate relationship with the Los Angeles of my mind. Of course, in 2025 we’re deep in tawdry, post-post-post irony mode, so Murray mocks and embodies a debased “mental deity” of Massachusetts with the obsessive affection of a dirty completist. Book vloggersThere’s a world of yackers on YouTube. Most stick to reviewing large-press fiction. But keener vloggers venture into independent presses and niche genres. Here are some trends. Best vloggers: Chanel Chapters (pictured) reviews from Melbourne with access to at least two excellent indie stores (Metropolis Bookshop and World Food Books) and local libraries. Chapters’ open mind, plunging cleavage, and sometimes potty mouth recently incited threats by YouTube to demonetize her! (All part of the global megamedia crackdown, folks.) But this reviewer continues to rock with wit, humor, urban tours and delicious fits. YouTube has not exactified what rules were broken, so WTF else is she supposed to do? Go, Chanel!Ana Wallace Johnson has accrued 68K subscribers not only for reviews (personal takes but I haven’t disagreed yet), but also for travel vids and glimpses of her low-budget/highbrow NYC lifestyle and tastes. What sets Wallace apart is a droll demeanor. Come for the laffs, stay for the books: Wallace’s taste ventures past mass-market narrative toward non-fiction, drama, used bookstores, and forays into independent presses. The Wallace wit includes impromptu raps where she observes her word-choices in the act—self-mocking/self-correcting. Her Sally Rooney review had me howling. Honorable mention: Chris Via on Leaf by Leaf has total cred and writes legit lit crit. Trend Watch: “Weird lit” is a big vlogger term, but notice how often it is equated with horror, a mega genre that occasionally edges into artful lit-fic via voices such as Elle Nash and Charlene Elsby. Also, is Shirley Jackson really “horror”? Vloggers sometimes confuse “weird women lit” with the “sad-girl novel” and straight-up narrative. Like, are Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney actually “weird”? This adjective is abused! Editor’s advice: Avoid non-descript, general terms: thing, stuff, good, bad, really, something and, yes, weird… unless that is indeed the best word. Emmalea Russo, Vivienne (Skyhorse, 2024) Resonant novel fashions a (fictional) update of (actual) deceased artist Hans Belmer’s long-surviving (fictional) lover Vivienne Volker. Vivienne may or may not have been involved in the long-ago suicide of Belmer’s other (fictional) lover Wilma Lang, who may or may not suggest (actual) writer and artist Unica Zürn. But never mind all that. It’s just intrigue to power the contemporary plot and stylistic gymnastics. These feats include revolving POVs and entire chapters rendered in YouTube comments. Themes include shady shenanigans of the art-world “industry”; the hypocrisies of cancel culture (the author was a prey of same); and cross-generational sex/romance offered nonchalantly. The book may haunt you months after reading if you encounter Belmer and Zürn. Jessamyn Violet, Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025)Uh-oh! A TikTok time bomb has burst the Superdoom Portal. A vengeful AI president punishes all citizens, sex bots and media stars. Nothing, it seems, can stop the haywire L.A Hellscape seen by twisted visionary Jessamyn Violet. Inside dope: The author wrote this dystopian funhouse during the first Trump preziduncy. She learned Maudlin House would publish it just as Trump was re-elected last year. This gives the story’s vindictive President TBD 3000 – and all its characters and scenes – the quality of a Cassandra curse. Except that it’s farcically funny. David Trinidad, Hollywood Cemetery (Green Linden, 2025)Heaven’s stars are quasi-immortal, while Hollywood’s are fated to fade. Graciously, Trinidad’s page-sized eulogies grant a couple dozen bit players one last flash-in-the-pan. The actors tell their own stories, but Trinidad’s voice floats above them, an angel wearing shades, bestowing epitaphs, footnotes and the harsh irony of glimmer and glamour doomed in a company town. (Capitalism, like time, is cruel.) The lives of these players (including one dog, Toto) end prosaically. Still, they emit elegantly tangy poetry, as does this book. Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala, Double Feature (Insurance Editions, 2024). Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala are poetry’s power couple. For decades they have lived, loved, performed and blown minds together. Equi with amusement, bemusement and rough-to-smooth edges that engage the senses, then the mind. Sala with knee-slap spit-takes on commodity culture borne from a career in advertising. Both are premiere pop poets, descending from the New York School of tender accessibility. Despite their years together, this is, to my knowledge, their first collaborative book. It’s two chapbooks in one… a bargain! Diva Corp USA, volume 2, zineI do not understand the art industry, especially how its monetary mechanics so unsustainably skew to collectors and a handful of “art stars.” This tracks roughly with music and publishing. But the art world erects a pantheon of demi-gods in acropolis museums: The new Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a $ billion palace of excess by “starchitect” Peter Zumthor. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein’s Diva Corp essay “Stop Crying Over Spilled Inauthenticity” says this “increasingly byzantine” world strains connections between genuine artists/art lovers and its buyers/institutions. And, as if embarrassed by fancy servicing of the 1%, it bathes in identity politics. Is this what makes it prone to serial cancelling even while its elites roam free, hypocritically? Other Diva Corp contributions include stories, poems and reproductions…all on newsprint. It performs its public service in mock mystery. I attended the launch event. The editors/publishers were MIA. They are anonymous. Issues were placed by the restroom toilets. I couldn’t find one. But they did print my theoretical manifesto “Das NeuroKapital.” Dunce Codex, anthologyPubbed by editor Roo, this is two collections: prose and poetry. Impressive design and voices. Gobs of lit-besties young and not so young: Benjamin Weissman, Dennis Cooper, Frank Demma, Gabby Sones, Lily Lady, Erin Satterthwaite, Riley Mac, Meat Stevens, Derek Fisher, Manuel Chavarria, Sophie Appel, Selva Imran, Priscilla Jasmine, Brittany Menjivar, Clarke e. Andros, Pedro Minet, Alistair McCartney, Thomas Moore, Eileen Myles, Jacqui Alpine, Charalampos Tzanakis, Amy Gerstler, Jimmy Vega. Plus many worthy peeps new to me. Freakishly, my name pops up in two unrelated pieces and in Roo’s intro! Order from duncecodex@protonmail.com. Car Crash Collective, anthologyLike Dunce Codex above, this robust volume is proof of scene solidity. It evolved from the same-named reading series by lit Angelenas Erin Satterthwaite and Brittany Menjivar. (Events in L.A., New York, Berlin and…) There’s no index, so rather than skip to a name, you open and read. Rewarding prose results include Zoey Greenwald, Kate Durbin, Chris Molnar, Taylor Lewandowski, Alec Niedenthal, Sarah Velk and Belinda Cai. Beau Geste, 2nd Issue, zineHere’s a multi-media mind fuck: A magazine that is also an oversized artwork is also documentation of a recent Los Angeles performance. Curated by Jordan Rountree, the texts/images reflect that event’s perpetration of a high-level goof: Ostensibly it celebrated playwright Bertold Brecht receiving a long-overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Except there is no such star for Germany’s socialist inventor of confrontational theater. (He deserves one: As a Nazi-fleeing expat in L.A., Brecht co-wrote the screenplay for the Fritz Lang-directed Hangmen Also Die!) Work is by Rountree plus Hannah Bhuiya, Brittany Menjivar, Joseph Mosconi, Zara Schuster, Ian F. Svenonius, Dakota Blue, Jean Marco Torres. Silicone God, Victoria Brooks (U.S.: House of Vlad, 2025, England: Moist, 2024)Here is part of my Introduction to the U.S. edition of this freak-ass novel: The characters and narrator(s) of Silicone God reference by inference what elsewhere has been termed The Singularity—the point where all technology hyper-evolves to one mass/individual consciousness. This is not a future historical period: It is a forever present. In Silicone God, that point is called Time. It manifests in the characters of future Silicone/human/god hybrids (their bodies composed of The New Flesh), while the Now is “our” limited experience as fleshly humans, also known as The Rotten. The author’s stand-in, Shae, envisions the Singularity of Time in passages that mix the cosmic with the tartly comic… and just plain bizarre… sometimes echoing (to me) the deranged geography of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations:“When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same colour as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes.” This partly explains Silicone God’s portal shifts of temporal teases. With tentacle-tongue in cheek, Brooks’ book’s dramatis personae embody a menu of preposterous and sublimely amusing monstrosity. Personal apocalypse is a hot and horny bitch mistress from a “future” (teasingly aggregated into the figure of Evaline), ever out-of-reach from a yearning ego-desire (loosely reduced to a self-conscious, auto-fictionesque narrator Shae). This scrambles “character” and “narrative.” Not to mention “gender.” And even “species.” Interrupting and disputing Shae’s chronology (directly on the page!) is Nez, a divine transexual character (created by mushroom gods 3,000 years in the future). Among these figures, a form of gender politics is at play. Males are backgrounded or subsumed into sometimes-competitive female psyches. And the carnally charged friction between these characters pistons plot conflict, intermingling their voices… suggesting that in Time, they are components of one God—or Goddess—psyche. Networking such concepts is a web of purposefully messy evolution imagery. This includes mushrooms, plus cephalopods and their anime tentacle-porn appendages. If mushroom gods usher in the Silicone Becoming of Time, does their form signify the phallus? As with the living, twitching dildoes in multiple sex-scenes, the answer is yes. Except, like everything in Silicone God, the phallus mutates, often mid-coitus, to female organs, and mixtures betwixt:“My little suckers cupped her skin – the slimy hot and cold sensations sending her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with blood so much that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came.”The Hamletesque, self-doubting narration of Shae jolts these freak shows with the frisson of lived experience. This is Silicone God’s twist on the (by-now) depleted or (always) ill-defined genre of auto-fiction. Did these scenes “really” happen? I don’t mean, did Shae’s legs really engorge into semi-autonomous octopus limbs, the better to pleasure her lover? But did the narrator want you to wonder if the author “really” was/is a multi-lover mistress gunning for full-on lesbo relations in a world of earthquaking gender norms? Or, is the shifting of skin and sexes a metaphor for lovers deceiving their intendeds and themselves? For seduction?Brooks cagily demurs. In a 2024 XRAY chat, she posited her theories of plastic narrative to me thusly: “My book gives dramatic colour to thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So, some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones!) are direct from experience. I've paired the very real, with the outright unreal.”

CRYING FROM THE DUST by Jace Einfeldt

April 14, 2025

A week after my baptism, I hit my little brother in the head with a tee-ball bat and sent my whole family into a frenzy on a Saturday afternoon in mid-March and got locked out of the family car and told to sit on the couch and think about what I did while my younger brother bled all over mom’s brand-new dishtowels in the middle seat of our 1998 emerald-green Yukon Denali. As my family flew down the street on angel’s wings, I contemplated what I had done while picking at the beige, peeling leather couch in the living room and ruminating on the eternal ramifications of hitting my younger in the head with a tee-ball bat in the middle of March as the promise of new beginnings and new life stirred outside with the birds nesting in the globe willow out back and the grass greening again after being suffocated under months of snow. I thought of how Jesus died for my sins. I thought about my recent baptism and how all my sins must have sloughed off my body and swirled around the drain and were sucked into the city sewer system never to return. I thought of how now Jesus and Heavenly Father must have hated me so much because wasn’t I supposed to be my brother’s keeper and not his assailant? I thought about how I must be beyond redeeming, beyond saving, beyond the grasp of God’s love because if Jesus had a younger brother He definitely would’ve looked out for him before He swung the brand-new tee-ball bat He got for his eighth birthday on a cold day in early March as an incentive from His Father to practice swinging a bat in preparation for the upcoming little league season. Yeah, Jesus would’ve taken every precaution. He would’ve made sure that His younger brother was still in the house and not following Him into the backyard because His younger brother only wanted to follow His perfect example, learn from His flawless batting stance, His celestial follow through, to learn from the Master Himself about what it looks like to wind up and smash a homer over the Wall of Jerusalem and straight past the Judean Desert and into the Dead Sea where the ball would float at the surface forever as a reminder of His power and majesty at the plate and His impeccable .407 batting average. Jesus would’ve meant business. He wouldn’t have taken the bat out back willy-nilly. He wouldn’t have swung it against the concrete basketball court because He wanted to kill an army of giant, imaginary spiders. And if He had crusaded against this imaginary army of spiders in a fit of righteous fury, He would have done so with the certainty that His younger brother was a safe distance away. He would have had the foresight to, at the very least, tell his younger brother to stay on the back patio because the spiders were mean and liked eating little brothers for lunch. He would’ve told His younger brother that He was there to protect him, to save him, to vanquish the army of giant, imaginary spiders because the last thing Jesus would ever want to do was to inadvertently harm His younger brother and send him to the hospital to get seven stitches from his temple to his hairline. Jesus’ younger brother would’ve been safe, and the spiders would’ve been slain. And years later, when the two of them are older, you might hope to find them sitting on a couch eating Salt and Vinegar Lays and sipping glass bottles of cane soda while the Angels play the A’s in Anaheim. They would be talking about JJ Bleday and how even though the A’s have a young roster this year that doesn’t mean the future isn’t bright. They’d clink their bottles and nod in agreement. Amen to that, they’d say. Amen and amen.

FISHING FOR KAT by Wendy BooydeGraaff

April 11, 2025

He flies into town, late, rents a room in the neighbourhood, meets her first thing in the morning, holds her, remembers how her mother looked, same dark eyes, same dark curl on the top of her head. Every six months, he catches milestones: crawling, walking, first words, kindergarten, high school. Same room, same turquoise couch, same breakfast snacks. Years. Back and forth. He becomes an intermittent constant.At home, he cleans out the extra room, installs a Murphy Bed, hangs her favorite poster. He investigates the local university, uses it as a lure she won’t resist.

JAKOB, I DO! UNTIL I DON’T! by Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch

April 10, 2025

We drank Prosecco on the number 31, escaping the confetti blizzard, the plastic champagne flute cheap between my lips but the ring heavy on my finger, while my parents returned to their hotel and we continued on the early bus—Who gets married at eight in the morning?—and some passengers clucked and said Cheers, but most looked out to the felt-clad streets where stony-faced bankers marched to the rain, then we chugged up a small mountain on a train, and still in my wedding dress with the matching red patent shoes, I whispered footsteps in snow strewn with autumn leaves, and later, after we thawed our bodies in steaming water and fucked in the bathtub, bones squeezed between ceramic and lobster-pink skin, I hid the bruises beneath an evening gown, and we toasted again, ate pizza and lit candles jammed into green glass bottles while I picked at wax cascades with manicured nails never knowing when this day, this love, this marriage, would end.

OUTSIDE HUSBAND by Natalie Warther

April 9, 2025

The survivalist stuff started as a hobby for my husband. An attempt to disconnect from the tech-dependent modern world. But quickly, our renovated backyard started looking more like a trash dump than a place to entertain the neighbors. He just kept making “tools.” Dental floss snares. Crayon candles. Pantyhose fishing nets. Dryer lint tinder. Maple syrup mouse traps. He used every single trash bag in the house for the water collection system. “Where are your shoelaces?” I called to my sons as they trudged towards the bus stop, flopping out of their sneakers.“Dad took them for his tourniquet kit.”When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he was outside. “Are you going to help me with these dishes?” I called one night from the kitchen window as he crouched over his little fire pit, throwing Vaseline-soaked cotton balls into the crayon flame. “I’m tending,” he said.Frisbee plates. Paperclip fish hooks. Cardboard sun hats. Coffee can pots. He took all the condoms from the nightstand and stuffed them with twigs. “To keep the kindling dry.” I marveled at how quickly it happened. One day he was coming into the house, sweaty from a long bike ride, kissing my neck so the kids would scream, the next he was fashioning my black thong into a slingshot and hoarding the apple seeds and peach pits that came back in the kids’ lunch boxes. Now he lives completely outside. His new rule: no coming inside the house, no interacting with electricity, no modern appliances or food products. The part I don’t understand is, isn’t a frisbee just as man-made as a plate?Apparently the Super Bowl is an exception. He comes in at half time, leaving the backdoor wide open. I say, I thought you weren’t supposed to come inside, and he says, We could get a TV for the deck, and I say, I thought you weren’t supposed to use electricity, and he says, I’m observing it, not using it, and I say, Don’t sit on the furniture. His friend comes by to borrow a saw. “Is Jim home?” “Kind of,” I say.We meet our counselor in the park. She asks what I miss most about my husband. I say it was how he made us laugh. “I can still make you laugh,” he says. So now he does weird things in front of the kitchen window, like draw a smiley face in mud on his belly, or pretend he’s being beaten up by a ghost, throwing himself on the ground repeatedly. Mostly I pretend I don’t see him.“Is it a sex thing?” my girlfriends ask.“Right, like, what does that say, that he wants to eat mice?”“Did you try calling him filthy? A filthy animal? Did you try calling him a filthy, disgusting, animal?” I haven’t tried that.The boys play games on his old phone. I buy them new crayons. I’ve learned how to clean the grill, back the truck into the garage, file taxes, fix the TV, fix the garbage disposal, pleasure myself sexually, trim a steak, and snake the drain with a hanger. He’s learned how to shit in a hole and eat bugs.I write reminders for him with sidewalk chalk on the driveway: BEN–SEMIFINALS– SATURDAY 2PM. He walks to the rink. Stands on the dumpster out back. Watches from the window.I know for a fact that he drinks beer out there. He must be taking it from the fridge in the garage. The electric fridge that uses electricity to keep its man-made contents cold.We put his shoes and suits in the dress-up box and my sons pretend to be my old husband. “Can we show Dad?” Luke says, but their dad’s already in his shelter, a piece of bark propped in front like a door. I flick the porch light once, twice, three times, he pops out his head and shouts “GOODNIGHT!” The boys blow kisses, naked except for the suit blazers. “WE LOVE YOU!” They yell. I shut the door and lock it.On Ben’s birthday my husband eats cake on the porch and the kids take selfies with him through the window. They draw pictures of our family: me with a stick-figure boy in each hand, their dad in a tree, beard, no pants. My mouth is a colored-in half moon, sangria red, no teeth, all lips and gums. I could be screaming or bleeding. Luke asks, Is Daddy going to come home soon? And I say, You’ll have to ask your father that. He says, Daddy, are you going to come home soon? And my husband says, I live outside now, Buddy, and Luke says, can we live outside with Daddy? And I say, No, and he says, Why not? And I say, Because we’re people, not animals, and he says, Is Daddy an animal? And I say, Yes. “It’s got to be a midlife crisis,” my girlfriends say. “Did he try jogging?”“Did he try sports cars?” “Did he try strippers?” “Yes,” they say. “We could fix this with strippers.”I take the garbage cans out to the curb and there’s my husband, gathering sticks, wearing his Eagles jersey, no pants. A true outdoorsman. He’s rubbing his beard and glaring at the front lawn. I could teach you how to use the mower, he says, and I say, I don’t have time, and he says, Well, I could mow it. And I say, Oh no, Dear, I wouldn’t want you to break one of your rules. I clean the gutters.I set up the new soccer net.I carry our sleeping sons from the car to their beds.The grass in the front yard gets longer and longer. The boys love it this way; they call it “the jungle.” I carve the Jack O'Lanterns. Pop the eyes out of the one that looks most like him.“I’m sunburnt,” he says to me through the window.“Put some mud on it.”“I have blisters,” he says to me when I walk to the mailbox.“Put some mud on it.”I stop changing the lightbulbs and stop washing the car and I throw out all of his clothes. Change the garage code. Lock all the doors and blast the AC. Bring the beer into the house. Drink it all. The grass just grows and grows.

VINYL HOUSES by Willow Campbell

April 8, 2025

There is a bony woman measuring things on the playground. She has a long tape measure that hooks in place. One end hugs the edge of a railroad tie bordering the perimeter of the wood chips. She measures the circumference of the area. She measures by the slide, the length of the monkey bars, the distance from climbing pyramid to swing set, and writes the numbers down in a three-ring notebook. The kids pay her no mind. They screech and race each other to the swings and climb up ladders and hang upside down. The woman deposits the tape measure into the sag of her bag and flips the notebook closed. She is silent and slow as she walks up the street, disappearing past vinyl houses.

COUSIN FRANCINE by Lynn Marie Rossi

April 7, 2025

All my cousin Francine wanted to ask about when I got to Georgia was 9/11. “You probably saw everything,” she said as we sat cross-legged on her bed.“I was seven,” I said. “That was a long time ago.” By then, I was ten, with only vague memories of that day: my mother talking my father out of packing suitcases; the sound of people shouting outside before my mother shut the windows, fearful of dust and chemicals. But Francine wanted falling bodies and clouds of ash. “You’re, like, right next to Ground Zero!” “We live on the Upper West Side,” I said. Geography meant nothing to Francine. She was thirteen and sitting in her bedroom felt like being in the presence of a wild animal. She spoke flatly, tamping down whatever Southern accent she might have, wore bruise-colored eye shadow, and painted her nails matte black. Her bedroom walls were covered with bands I’d only vaguely heard of: Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, My Chemical Romance. Their images were cut from magazines or printed from school computers, all held up with Scotch tape, paper trembling in currents of central air conditioning. Below her oversized Taking Back Sunday hoodie, she wore tank tops and already had boobs. On her wrists, she wore jelly sex-bracelets, though I noticed she rolled her sleeves down to hide them whenever she was actually out in public. “Guys grab at the ones that mean the thing they want from you. The black ones mean sex,” she explained to me, “and the blue ones are blowjobs.”“What?”“Blowjobs. Those are when you suck on a guy’s dick.”I was only vaguely certain what a dick was, with little idea of what would happen if you sucked on one. “Have you ever done that?”She shook her head. “Not yet. But I practice.” She didn’t elaborate. After years of refusing the invitations of friends who vacationed in Florida, my parents finally felt obligated to say “Yes,” and left me at my aunt and uncle’s place outside Atlanta on their way. “Less than a week,” my father told me as he lifted my bags from the rental car trunk. My left ear hadn’t unpopped after the plane landed, and I opened and closed my jaw, barely listening.“Just four days,” my mother said. “Four long days.” The whole trip made her antsy and irritable in the same way as waiting in line in the grocery store. She had a native New Yorker’s idea of the South, made nervous by such “conservative” and “backwards” people. Dad pointed out that she’d grown up on Staten Island.My aunt and uncle’s house was a giant McMansion in a neighborhood full of them. Each looked cobbled from scraps of brick and fake stone and vinyl siding. Juliet balconies jutted from two-car garages. Pool pumps harmonized in backyards. The mid-August air was unbearable; nobody had trees and there weren’t any sidewalks.Inside, photographs lined the wall beside the staircase, one of which showed me, fresh-birthed in a hospital crib. “Can’t get over you becoming a young woman!” Aunt Jane stared at me as I dragged my suitcase up the steps. “Me neither!” I didn’t know what to do besides match her breathless energy. She showed me to the guest bedroom, where their dog, Pierre, spent most of the day. He was an old Bichon with perpetually wet, brown fur around his mouth. He hated me immediately, growling from his place on the bed. “Oh, P, stop it! Be nice to your cousin.” Jane shooed him away. He scurried, wheezing, off into the hall. “He’ll get used to it. Maybe he’ll try snuggling with you!”“Here’s hoping!” Within minutes of my uncle returning home from his car dealership, we were gathered at the table, eating Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. The small crocodile on Uncle Chris’s polo was askew; Francine later told me she’d unstitched every one in his wardrobe after being grounded for downloading music on Kazaa. Jane did her best to reattach them, and Chris still wore the shirts out of spite. After sunset, my mother called to tell me they’d made it to Florida. “There was a snake in the condo. Your father threw a shoe.”“And missed.” They took turns complaining over the phone about their accommodations, never asking how things were with me. After twenty minutes of me saying “oh” or “mm-hmm,” we hung up. I found Francine watching an anime about pirates. “It’s really far along,” she said. “It'd be hard to catch you up on the plot.” Uncle Chris was asleep in front of one of their many other televisions. Aunt Jane sat at the kitchen island with a glass of wine and an issue of Better Homes and Gardens, staring intently at copper pots hanging above the stove.I snuck through the sliding glass doors and out to the back deck. Night was no cooler than day. I pulled up a chair to the edge of the pool and watched a dead frog float from one end to the other. For the first time, I sensed I’d been set up for a lifetime of comparing everything to New York. Once the others went to bed, I ventured back inside. Through the dark, I found my bedroom. I couldn’t figure out how to work the lamp on the bedside table, then cried for a while before realizing I had to pee and had no idea where the upstairs bathroom was. I panicked, shaking below the covers. Finally, seeing no better option, I squatted in a corner of the bedroom and went on the carpet. In the morning, everybody blamed Pierre, who took a scolding from Aunt Jane with his head down, drool dripping from his tiny lips. Uncle Chris scrubbed the carpet with Resolve, leaving a bleachy splotch.Breakfast was microwaved sausage and egg sandwiches, soggy and chewy. Aunt Jane had “so many errands!” so Francine and I got into her PT Cruiser with her and set off. The drive was all six-lane roads and chain restaurants. It wasn’t until we arrived at the mall that I saw a human being outside of a car.Aunt Jane dropped us off at the multiplex entrance. “Napoleon Dynamo starts in twenty minutes—here’s money. France, I’ll text ya.”The instant the car pulled away, Francine walked briskly through the mall doors, going in the opposite direction of the theater, texting on her cherry red Razr. “We’re not going to the movie?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment. “No,” she said. “I already saw it. Mom just always forgets what I’ve been up to the instant it’s over.”“Oh.”“You can go, though.”“It’s okay. I don’t really want to.”“No, you should go. I’m meeting somebody.”“Can I come?”She sighed. “Look, can you just give me an hour by myself? Maybe a bit more? I can’t have some little kid following me around the whole time. We’ll meet back at this fountain?” She pointed at a bubbling monstrosity at the center of a large atrium nearby. People sat here and there at tables along its rim, eating buttery soft pretzels. I noticed a boy lurking among the fake palm trees. He stood with a hunch and wore baggy, black clothes, his pant legs criss-crossed by straps and a chain wallet. Hair dangled down over his face, but I saw his eyes lock on Francine.“Meeting that guy?” I asked.Francine looked panicked, then put her hand on my shoulder. “Look, I’m not telling you to fuck off because I don’t think you’re cool. I do. You’re my cool, New York cousin. You can handle yourself. But that dumbass doesn’t know that. He’s just gonna see you as a little kid. Though you’re not.”I nodded. “Thanks.”“And because you’re cool, I know you won’t say anything to my parents.”“Of course.”“An hour.”“An hour.”Wandering around, I realized that I’d never set foot in an actual mall. I found an FYE and browsed the CD racks, picking one up now and then and listening to thirty-second song samples at a headphone station. The whole mall smelled like floor wax, burgers, and perfume. Pacsun kids loitered in Pacsun; Hot Topic kids in Hot Topic. For a time, I wandered the dark recesses of an Abercrombie, holding too-big spaghetti-strap shirts up to my torso.In the food court, I spotted Francine and the boy at a table, eating samples of orange chicken from small white cups. He held his hands out to her like he was begging for something. My cousin sighed and looked up at the skylights. Finally, with a tilt of her head, she gestured towards the restrooms, and the two of them walked together in that direction. The boy’s face was a grimace of nervous excitement; his slouch straightened. My first instinct was to follow them, but I didn’t. Instead I walked back towards the fountain. On the way, I saw a group of small children gathered around a Kiwanis Club-sponsored coin funnel, pennies circling as they slowly succumbed to gravity. While my aunt and uncle slept, Francine and I watched Invader Zim in the den. Pierre lay at my feet; I’d brokered peace at dinner by feeding him a chicken nugget under the table. “That boy you were hanging out with,” I said. “How old is he?”“Ha. He’s forty-seven. He’s my math teacher.”“Seriously.”“He’s fifteen. Met him at Chick-fil-A a couple weeks ago.”“I saw you and him going into the bathrooms.” “Yeah?” Francine kept her eyes on the TV, though I could tell she was worried about what I’d ask.“Were you doing drugs?”She laughed. “Drugs? No. Not that it’s your fucking business.”“Sorry.” When the episode ended, Francine flipped to MTV2 in time to watch a Fall Out Boy music video.“If you have to know,” she said when the song was over. “I was showing him my vagina.” My stomach went weightless. “He asked me to shave it for him, and he wanted proof that I did. So we went into a bathroom stall and I showed him.”I knew about pubic hair from everything I’d seen on the internet, and had been wondering about when my own would come in, but hearing someone talk about the subject of their vagina so bluntly threw me off. “Did he show you anything?”“No. He was scared. Told me to trust him, that he has a big dick, blah blah. Typical.” She turned to me. “Look, Marie. If a guy ever asks you to do anything like that, you don’t have to. If you don’t want. Don’t let him make you think it’s something you want, either. Okay? Just want whatever it is you want. Like, the minute I can get my nipples pierced, I’m gonna. But because I want to. Not for anyone else.” It was the most straightforward anybody had been with me about the matter of my body, or of the one I’d soon have.“Alright. Thanks.” I wanted to hug her, demand she teach me more, but stopped myself. Sometime after that, I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, Francine had wrapped me in a blanket and left a glass of water on the coffee table beside me, which tasted bubbly and odd in the early morning. On my last day in Georgia, it rained. We sat around watching daytime television. Francine scratched at her crotch. Uncle Chris clicked around on the computer doing research for a fantasy football draft, commenting out loud every few minutes about how slow the computer had gotten since it had been used for all that downloading. Aunt Jane puttered around the house.“Alright,” she said just before noon. “We can’t sit around here all day. Summer’s wasting! If we have to stay inside, we can go to Babyland!”“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Francine said, furiously typing text messages.“Don’t.” “Why would we want to do baby stuff?”“Hey! Watch it.”“Right, Marie?” My cousin turned to me. “We’re too old for it?”I shrugged. “I don’t even know what it is.”“Cabbage Patch Kids place. It’s like a theme park of dolls. Out in an even more boring suburb than this one.”I remembered having one of the dolls as a little girl, with yarn hair and a blue dress. Once, I threw it up in the air the way I’d seen adults do with real babies and its plastic face knocked me in the face and split my lip. “I had one of those a while ago,” I said.“See, Mom? We’re too old. It’s creepy.”“What if I said that I wanted to go?” Aunt Jane asked. “Would that be enough? If I asked that you do something for me? Unless you feel like sticking around here with your father, hearing him mutter about pretend football.”Uncle Chris didn’t turn from the monitor. “Please, girls, go. It’ll make her happy.”“And we can have lunch at Bojangles.” Aunt Jane dangled her car keys off her fingers. Francine roused herself from the recliner with a sigh and I followed. Inside Babyland, dolls stared impassively from their shelves. Little girls squealed and ran from place to place, picking up their new toys and bringing them to a small office where a woman dressed as a nurse made them take an adoption oath, fingers raised in the air, swearing they’d take seriously the responsibilities of motherhood.Following the mass of mothers and daughters, we came to a nursery staged behind enormous windows, the glass smudged. . In bassinets, dolls wore cloth diapers. Aunt Jane looked delighted. . A mechanical stork twisted back and forth above our heads, beak chattering. When it faced us head-on, I saw that one eye blinked while the other stayed half shut like it was having a stroke. Finally, we got to the central room. Most of the space was taken up by a fake patch of dirt. Doll’s heads stuck out here and there like ripe cabbages on beds of leaves. In the center of everything was a tree, a plaster monstrosity whose limbs reached up to the ceiling. In its trunk were round television screens where gestating doll fetuses were visible, floating in green-tinted amniotic fluid. Tubing snaked from plastic IV drips into different points in the soil, their sloshing contents labeled IMAGINATION.“Have you been here before?” I asked Francine.“Every couple of years,” she said. “I was into it before I realized how fucked up it all is. Trying to make women okay with becoming, like, breeding cows.”“It’s just toys,” I offered.“Not down here, it’s not.”Another nurse appeared, speaking into a headset microphone. “Mother Cabbage is getting ready to have a baby!” She pulled out a large caliper and measured the tree’s trunk. “She’s five leaves dilated!” The doll heads writhed in place around her as she described a magic dust that fell invisibly from the branches above. “It determines whether she has a girl or a boy. Which are we looking for today?”The crowd of women and girls shouted for a boy. The nurse stuck a plastic speculum into a space in the roots, and with feigned effort pulled from the depths a naked doll with a full head of hair and rosy cheeks. “Looks like this one is gonna get a new home right away. ” She handed the doll to a nearby child who immediately held it close to her chest. Aunt Jane and the other mothers applauded. When the birth was over, we slowly retraced our steps back to the entrance. I followed Francine in a daze while Aunt Jane lingered at the glass cabinets displaying the vintage toys, then insisted on buying me a t-shirt I knew I’d never wear. Out in the lot, a child melted down; somehow, her brand new doll burst a seam somewhere between the shop and the car, and stuffing bled from the hole, blowing in tufts across the asphalt.

* * *

It wasn’t until years later that I saw Francine again. She visited New York for a weekend right before I finished college. I met her at a bar near Penn Station. She dragged a suitcase, ready to head to JFK the moment we finished. Gone were the hoodie and jeans, replaced by a tunic dress and leggings; she’d stopped hiding her accent, giving her words a drawl I found musical.I thought about bringing up that trip to Georgia, but couldn’t fit it into the conversation, not wanting to resurrect those girls we’d been. But I felt I owed her somehow. The advice she’d given me, while imperfect, was the first I’d been offered to guide me. By the time we met as women, I’d stumbled and fucked up plenty, and wanted to share it all with her as we sat, filling one another in on what we’d missed. If she lived closer, I thought, we might’ve been like sisters.I haven’t seen her since, of course. A month after that day in the cafe, she met the man who eventually became her husband. They live in Boulder now with two children. They send me a Christmas card each year.“Oh,” she said as she finished her drink, looking at her phone. “Plane’s delayed.”“Huh. Well. Anything else you wanted to see?” My life, New York City, all I had to offer: it all seemed insufficient.“What would you do with two hours?” Francine smiled, deferring to me, waiting for an answer, for me to open her world up in the way she’d opened mine.

FACIAL GEOMETRY by Sagar Nair

April 6, 2025

When he was a child, my dad lost two fingers working at the matchbox factory and declared three as his lucky number. He owned three of every shirt, prayed three times a day, and went to the Lygon casino on the third of each month. He ate ramen with three chopsticks, and sticky dots of broth sprayed across the table, onto his Tim Winton novels. We liked the crunch of Cajun grilled corn. We toothpicked kernels from between our teeth, and threw the cobs at each other's heads. Pretended to have seizures on the floor. On the drive to the convenience store after his AA meeting, he played Fleetwood Mac and The Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan’s voice pulsed through the speakers. He checked himself in the visor mirror and his smile vanished. “I look like a blobfish,” he said. But our faces shared the same geometry. The sunset pinked the clouds, the West Gate Bridge speared the skyline. He bought me rice crackers, and when the cashier wasn’t looking, I tucked a Reese’s peanut butter cup under my windbreaker. I ate at home in the shrine room. The pedestal fan blasted, and I leaned my forehead against the Maitreya statue to be kissed by the coolness of its marble. Dad kicked me out to pray, but I pressed my ear to the door, trying to hear his wishes, trying to become his god.