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WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE A GUN AND NOT A TARGET by Sutton Strother

He’s the only other person you know who loves David Bowie. Not like your friends tolerate David Bowie for your sake or how your mom only knows the radio hits. He knows all the albums you talk about, every deep cut. “Modern Love” is his favorite Bowie song (killer drums, he says right before the first verse kicks in), so on days when there’s a test in his class you listen to it while you dress for school. It reminds you not to hate him, no matter how difficult he makes the questions. There’s power in the not-hating.And when your step-dad slams your step-brother's body against the side of the family van, he listens. And when your mom gets knocked up, he listens. He listens during lunch and after school and on his planning period (he won’t rat you out for ditching history to visit him). You sit together on the tables of his empty classroom, your leather platform boots kicking the toes of his Payless loafers.He lets you steal his CDs – not just Bowie but The Police and Peter Gabriel and The Who – and brings you DVDs from home. He tells you what to love about everything, and you repeat his opinions back to him like a clever parakeet. He compliments the haircut your friends say is butch. He tells you your singing voice is beautiful when you practice “Kashmir” for the talent show. When the bell rings, he stops you in the doorway of his classroom to finger the sleeve of your new satin blouse and whisper his approval.He signs emails with Love and his first name.He smells rotten. It’s nothing you’d notice if he weren’t hovering over your desk to murmur an inside joke, but he hovers so much. Sometimes you catch yourself putting distance between the two of you, avoiding the radius of that stench. You’re never quite sure where on his body it’s coming from, but it’s bad enough to keep you from doing something stupid. Not that you want to do something stupid, although at seventeen you’re aching for some wildness that could set you apart from the Christian girls in Abercrombie. The joke, of course, is all those girls are getting laid while you’ve wasted two years pining for a boy who doesn’t want you and a girl who can’t want you. Nobody will ever want you. There will only ever be him with his stink and his weak chin and the swirls of back hair peeking through his cheap white dress shirt. You don’t want him. There’s power in the not-wanting. You wrest his desire from his own hands to wield against him. You mock it with friends who call you a cock tease, and even then you say things like What if I’m not teasing? then cackle when they shriek Who would ever fuck him? Certainly not you.Though if you did, you wouldn’t be the first. When you were a sophomore, all the seniors told you a soccer player sucked his dick for a college recommendation letter.But that might not be true.And anyway, you wouldn’t. Not that he was asking (the smart ones never ask, you’ll learn from some feminist blog when you’re twenty-two). He talks a lot about giving up teaching to become a doctor. Some days he means it, and on those days, you come home and cry.You wish he were your step-dad, real dad, foster dad. He’s barely old enough to be any of those things.And he’s too old to marry. Isn’t he? You sometimes imagine it anyway, more thought experiment than wish. It would mean living with his mother, but she would die eventually. It would mean never leaving your hometown. It would mean a partner with a steady job and a music collection you didn’t hate. You could do worse than that. Your mother did worse than that. But there’s the stink of him to consider (maybe it’s halitosis, you and your friends posit, maybe it’s a glandular thing). You think of curdled milk and mummy wrappings. You couldn’t endure it for very long. Then one day you’re in a crowded room somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, watching a robot from North Carolina battle the robot your classmates built, and suddenly the stink is everywhere. It stings your nose, trickles sour down the back of your tongue, clogs your pores. It settles on your hair and clothes like smoke. Two hands grip your shoulders from behind and begin to knead them. You remember the day sophomore year when he taught your class about chromosomes. The boys all laughed and said you were so mannish you must have been born with an X and a Y. He laughed too, but when you gave them all the finger, he didn’t frown or tut or send you to the principal’s office. You let yourself believe he was on your side.You lock eyes with a friend across the room. She’s taking all this in, biting into her lip like she’s holding in a scream (I was jealous of that attention, she’ll confess fifteen years later, I just wanted someone to love me, even a creep like him) and you’re holding in a scream of your own (you’ll tell her you wanted the same thing). He slips his fingers beneath the collar of your T-shirt, and no one is stopping him (he will kiss your face at graduation, in the middle of another crowded room). You’re not stopping him (next year, when you’re at college, he’ll tell his students lies about you). This moment just won’t stop happening (you’ll hear a rumor that he’s sleeping with one of those students). You bite your cheek and keep holding in the scream (this time you’ll know it’s true). You believe (he has probably done all of this a dozen times before), you have got to believe (he is probably doing this right now), there’s power in the not-screaming.
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TOGETHER WE GROW by Katie Oliver

My boyfriend is a plant enthusiast: the more exotic the better. Old man’s beard, elk horn, fishbone. The bedroom is particularly full of them. They hang from curtain poles, draping down like Rapunzel’s hair. Distressingly phallic cacti loiter in corners; succulents take up space where they shouldn’t.Cacti are a type of succulent, he tells me.Whatever, I reply.You’re succulent, he says, and bites my neck. I roll my eyes.I go along with it, because it’s easier.When I get back from work, more seem to have appeared.Did you buy more plants?No, he says, flipping through channels. I squint at each wall, the table, the windowsill, unconvinced.The other day, practically cooing, he’d shown me a time lapse of plants moving over a twenty-four-hour period, wiggling their little arms wherever the sun went. Disney versions of plants. Cute. Not like the ones in here, which seem to writhe and moan during the night, creeping tendrils into my dreams. When I wake up they’re in different positions to when I went to sleep.Are you fucking with me? I ask.What? No.I wasn’t talking to you.The next week I’m reaching into the bookshelf when one of the cacti stabs me. That’s the only way I can describe it: it skids along the shelf and plants its spiny arm into mine, deliberately. My boyfriend is coldly incredulous, the way he tends to be whenever anything unusual happens; as if the unknown is personally offensive to him. He said that I must have slipped when I was getting the book, and was I on my period or something?The paramedic said she’d never seen an allergic reaction like it.I call in sick for the rest of the week, burrowing under the duvet and then abruptly emerging again as I come into contact with something lumpy and unexpected. I pull a fat little succulent out from down near my feet. Soil scatters over my arm, which has started to turn green.When I wake up, more of them are in bed with me. My boyfriend has started to believe me, because last night he rolled over onto a cactus and now he’s on the sofa, sulking. I keep trying to move them out, but as soon as I turn my back they’ve jumped in again, snuggling in close and giving happy little sighs. The swelling has started to go down, but my arm is green from shoulder to wrist, and soft spines have started to grow from where the little hairs used to be. The next time I wake, the old man’s beard has moved from the curtain rail and is now perched directly above me. A seaweedy frond has snaked around my wrist and grips iron-tight.Get off me! I shout, struggling.I think I hear it say no.My boyfriend left a few days ago.Those plants are taking over your life, he said.I know, I said. Sorry.I haven’t been able to move from the bed for several weeks now. More plants have gathered around, eager to join the fun. Each limb bound with strong vines; my body tapestried to the mattress and woven over with flowers. Kindly souls drip nectar into my open mouth and allow me sips of water. I am leaf-skeleton light, but alive. My spines have hardened into dangerous points. I no longer know where the plants end and I begin. Together, we begin to creep back to the perimeter of the room, to breathe and grow. Waiting for the next one to join us.
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THE FOUR SEASONS by Trent England

She was sixty-nine, he was seventy. In the kitchen she baked two halves of an apple sprinkled with cinnamon. He drank iced coffee and did his Sean Connery impression. She pulled down a shoebox from a shelf in the closet and read her old journals. He took photos of their Pontiac and tapped on his phone and in a few minutes it was officially for sale, online, a part of their history up for grabs. She got a root canal that cost more than three mortgage payments, back when they had a mortgage. He bought a new phone that cost more than his first car. She received another brochure in the mail about twin cemetery plots and headstones. He wondered if, when people looked at him, they thought he was still in his sixties. She watched the neighborhood kids wait at the curb for the school bus. He scraped the dead skin off his heels. She stopped watering the house plants. He didn’t notice. She watched 7 Eyewitness News at Noon while dust particles danced in the light. He stalked his great-niece’s Instagram looking for photos of his estranged brother. She bought an old typewriter and displayed it on the mantle. He planted broad beans in the garden. She took the cordless phone into the bathroom and called back interested buyers and said the car was no longer for sale. He voted straight-ticket Democrat. She watched liver spots appear overnight like crop circles. He quit red meat, cold turkey. She read the newspaper and told him she was glad she never had to be a reporter in this economy. He said he kind of wished he were still teaching, just to have something to do. In bed she paused the movie they were watching and said that adult children seemed like the worst, don’t they, just the most ungrateful people. He nodded toward the TV and said he liked that Kristen Wiig, and is it pronounced wig or weeg. She dreamed that a tiger was always walking away from her. He read the comments. She watched the snow melt and wash away winter’s brown slush. He watched the flowers bloom and the grass grow. She sat in the Bonneville and inhaled the scent of its interior, still impossibly cinnamon. He wondered if it was too late to father a child.She suggested they try something new and sleep on different sides of the bed. He rinsed with blue mouthwash and said yes. She settled into his spot and wondered if, by doing this, she would learn how his mind had been working all these years. He cleared his throat. She thought he sounded like he was going to say something. He rolled over and looked at her. She looked back. And in the dark they knew each other again as ageless, pre-human things.
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HOW I LEARNT TO DRIVE by Roseline Mgbodichinma

Sometimes brown girls can wear black. Not the colour, but a mood, a presence, a halo. I hold my aunt's hand as she struggles with the chain. I want to tell her there’s no use, it can’t cage her spirit, but I stop myself.The Ward smells of grudges and longing. What is madness, if not a pile of lost love and mercy? There is something about blue that’s retrograde. It's the colour of sky fading into evening, the colour of hospital bedsheets the severe cases lie on. Scratch on the walls suggest a previous occupant might have had claws. Blue is the look in my Aunt's eye that means a vacuum, the hotness of tears rolling down her caramel onyx face.The perfume of catarrh and puss-filled wounds is close to disinfected avocado. These markings on the wall remind me of history class. After this no one can convince me cavemen were completely sane. Everyone here is brought in with a sense of urgency, like preparation for a carnival. Their escorts try to make sense of the nonsensical, to explain how the patient went from drinking coffee to grabbing their niece’s collar bones and picking dirt off the ground. Suddenly dust tasted like coca and stones turned to bread, their grin turned to the devil’s.This is a home of monologues. Here, the self is both actor and spectator; the protagonist, an extra, a prop forever tied to insanity. My aunt is still struggling, she is remembering objects. Says we should bring her the basin of eggs she bought decades ago. Says I should return the bus fare she gave me for school. She wants to microwave a can of water.I know beauty can distort the truth. That evening she wore a mustard top and grey shorts. Her curls blew out bouncy like springs. I should have sensed her stream of consciousness when she climbed onto six-inch stilettos to go to the market? I can’t forget that evening. The phone rang nonstop. When I picked up, a stranger described her nakedness. Said she stood sulking like an offering, ready to bolt at the sight of clothes or a helping hand.Emergency is an efficient teacher. The first time I got behind the wheel of a car, was to drive my aunt to the hospital. I buckled the seat belt and evaded turns like the plague. A doctor pulled her from the backseat; she believed it was a kidnapping. He assumed my novice driving was from shock, but any ignition will start when a vein of worry inserts a key.The nurse pumps liquid into her bloodstream and she lays sly like a toad. She wakes up a wilding, hence the chain. She calls for the husband who swallowed her sanity as sleeping pills, the one who murmured 'I do' on the altar with his diseased mouth. She asks for her purse, the one she left at the mercy of the road, the one waiting there for thieves.Maybe new memories will grow when we abandon the old ones.
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THE HEAT by Connor Thompson

Because of the heat, she decides to sleep downstairs. “This old townhouse funnels the stuff upwards like acid reflux,” she says. She slips from the sheets, props the standing fan under her arm. 

It’s fine by him; he relishes in spreading out on the bed without her. (Starfishing, she calls it.) He listens to her footsteps recede on the stairs and unfurls his limbs to the four corners of the mattress. Above him the ceiling fan carves circles in the air, striving to please.

Two days ago an ambulance came down their street at an un-ambulance-y pace and pulled its left two wheels up onto the sidewalk in front of a house three doors down. The paramedics brought out an old woman and tucked her into the back. One by one, as if on bad knees, the wheels clunked gingerly back onto the street and the ambulance pulled away. The lights twirled without spirit. No siren.

She says, “I hope when I go they put their back into it. I want to scream through the streets. Blast through red lights. I want the people to know that death is in their midst.”

“It’s the heat,” he says. “This almost visible heat, creeping through the neighborhoods and stripping life away.” 

“This heat,” she says. “This sludgy, quicksand heat, with nowhere to go but into us.” 

He can almost taste it: like a membrane on his tongue, hints of moist metal and decay. She can almost hear it: the vibrations in the space between the molecules, the science-fiction throb of radiation.

They hear of toddlers desiccated in the back seats of SUVs; dogs too. They shake their heads at these distant tragedies. “This evil heat,” he says. “You can almost smell it, can’t you? It’s like, it’s like . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.

In the morning she is gone before he awakes, the pull-out couch a swamp of sheet and pillow. Her scent is there, her residue, among the creases and stains. He lifts the edge and folds the evidence of their sleeping arrangement back into itself.

At this moment she is in their car, among other cars, waiting for a light to change. Sweat beads on her temples, her dress shirt already translucent with moisture. She shields her eyes against the rising sun. The radio tells her not to hope. 

She gets home at seven. 

“Two more ambulances today,” he says. 

“They’re dropping like flies,” she says. 

They sleep apart again. 

“It’s on you,” she says. “It’s coming off you in waves.” 

In the silence, he hears the clunk of the couch being pulled out. When he stretches out his joints creak and tingle and sigh.

He surprises her by getting up when she gets up. He is sitting in the kitchen when she emerges from the shower. He says he wants to get a start on the day. She has told him: you need to attack life, you need to be proactive. Lately, she tells him: you need to find a job. She is pleased to see a stack of resumes on the table in front of him. 

“I’m only going to apply at places with air conditioning,” he says.

While she waits for a light to change he sits on the couch where she sleeps and watches the ambulances come up the street. They clamber onto the sidewalks and swallow up the bodies the paramedics present like offerings. The bodies are not all elderly—one is a woman no more than forty.

The resumes are still on the table when she gets home. He tells her about the ambulances, about the younger woman. She can see it has rattled him. “The traffic is getting lighter,” she says.

The next morning they awake in their separate beds to a line of ambulances blocking the street and she stays home from work. The electricity is off. A battery-powered radio tells them to expect rolling blackouts. Together they sit on the couch and watch the parade of corpses: elderly, adult, teenaged, infant, wheeled one by one towards the ambulances, placed gently inside. He imagines the bodies dissolving, like a candy on the tongue.

Their sweat is permanent, a second skin they never shed. They eat crackers and tuna for lunch. “Weird,” she says, “without the hum of the house.” The silence spreads out beneath them. Its depth makes them uneasy, like open water, like anything too vast to have an edge.

There is a flurry of activity at the end of the street. One paramedic is fighting another paramedic because, it seems, one paramedic has stolen the corpse out of the back of the other paramedic’s ambulance. They flail at each other and tear their uniforms. The first paramedic throws a punch and knocks the other one out. A third paramedic scoops up the unconscious paramedic and places him in the back of his ambulance.

“This heat,” he says.

The next day there are no ambulances.

She says, “I wonder . . .”

They knock on their neighbor’s door and it swings inward. They take a box of cereal and a bottle of soda from the pantry before they go. In each house, they snatch a sort of treasure: a can of soup, a pair of slippers, a book of piano music. It feels both right and wrong. It feels to him like they are following instincts now that they had long ago suppressed. They are in the eighth house and she is standing in the living room with an umbrella propped under her arm when she announces she doesn’t feel well. 

He checks the last few houses on his own. In one he finds an aquarium with two orange fish swimming around. He gets it halfway home before the sweat on his hands causes it to slip and crash to the sidewalk. The fish twitch on the concrete and are still.

In the kitchen, he pours them glasses of warm soda. She sits at the table with her head in her hands. They use the resumes as coasters.

That night he stretches to the corners of the bed. His shoulders grind like unclutched gears, hips scream like ocean liners colliding. He stretches further than he ever has before. His fingers and toes flick in the air over the lip of the mattress and he thinks how easy it would be to simply break apart.

But then she is there above him. He moves over and she climbs in. She runs her fingertips over his chest, paints pictures of glaciers and mountain valleys and coral reefs and low clouds. Above them, the ceiling fan is still.

In the morning her hand is on his chest, except it isn’t. It’s just her heat that is there.

He finds her in the bathtub and she is mostly gone. He puts his hand on her forehead. It’s cooler in the porcelain, she says. He turns the tap and water comes out. Not warm or cold, just water. There is no answer when he calls for an ambulance. He leaves the water on but it does not cool her, nor does it wash her away.

That night he is stretching on the bed when the power comes on. The house spasms, resuscitated, the current rushing in like blood returning to a sleeping limb, tingly and hopeful. Above him, the ceiling fan resumes its half-hearted ambulations. He curls his limbs back into himself and blinks in the midst of such sudden life.

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HOME SOON FOR A HOME COOKED MEAL by Paul Rousseau

Dad is not here, but he should be, soon, from work. He doesn’t drink and he’s not having an affair. He is a big man, I know. He likes red meat and horseradish. My sister’s boyfriend works, too, at the train depot, but him and my sister are both upstairs already. 

Mom puts butter rolls in the oven at 425 degrees. Lying on my back in the family room, I have my feet on the grille of our gas fireplace. I test myself to see how long I can rest my feet on the glass part where it’s hot. I’ve seen mom try it. Ten seconds, fifteen. My feet are like tiny sock puppets. I know it’s time to remove them from the charred surface when they curl up. I grit my teeth at twenty seconds.

My feet shrivel like burning plastic melting over a lighter. Over a match. Over a box of matches. Over a bonfire. The protective screen is plagued with black singe marks from the loose threads that burn off and stick. 

I switch from the glass to the grille again and the heat follows. I rub my toes from top to bottom between the gold looking bars. A tone sounds as I strum across them like a xylophone from the blue-hot place at the center of the fake logs. From Hell. The notes are too close together. Too similar in pitch. I test the dissonance, louder each time, blaming it on a goblin who strikes the bars using a tiny foot mallet. He crawls in and out with a finger over his mouth, hushing me. I test mom’s patience. She doesn’t want him in our home. 

Next, my heels are treated, hitting the hot pressure points and nerve endings. I lie there with my mouth open like a doll’s, arms out, very limp. My cheeks’ spider-leg veins are reflected in the gold paint, flushed and prickly. Mom had to come get me from school early today. But it’s late now, or just dark. I check the clock on the VCR. It is 5:30 PM, in January, in Minnesota. It is dark. Dad should be home soon for a home cooked meal. 

KC the Cat misleads me behind my back, going one way, a pirouette, then the other. 

“You tricked me,” I say. “Your loss. I was going to pet you.” 

KC the Cat is five years old. I am thirteen, but mom says I have an old soul. 

Dad walks in and trips on my boots in the mudroom. 

“What did I say this morning? What did I tell you to do?” he asks, out of breath from almost falling to the floor on the wet dirt-rug. 

“You were supposed to move these! There needs to be an unobstructed walking path!” He doesn’t drink, he’s not having an affair. He is just angry. I think work makes him angry. Mom says that’s just the way he is. 

“We have a shoe bin!” He yells. 

Dad holds his knee while coming at me, through the kitchen, down the single step into the living room where I continue to stir, slowly. I picture him clumsily dashing on all fours like an injured farm animal. 

He slaps the back of my head. I feel my hair get matted up. He orders me to spit on my palm, I do, and then he presses the damp side against the hot glass of the fireplace where I just had my feet. It hisses. Mom screams. Dad is trying to catch his breath. He grabs at his chest. He falls to the floor. All the noise makes my sister and her boyfriend come downstairs. My sister covers her mouth with her hand. 

“Jesus Christ,” her boyfriend says. 

The fire alarm goes off. The butter rolls are burning in the oven. My hand is burning. My sister’s ears are burning. Her boyfriend goes to fan the smoke detector with a blanket. He is used to furnaces and steam engines and heat. Dad is seizing on the carpet. I get up and open a door. KC the Cat runs out into the snow. I look at the neighbor’s chimney, and the chimney next to theirs. I look at the exhausting smoke and wonder if it’s from the combustion of wood or gas.

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SELF-MAINTENANCE by John Chrostek

I live at the bottom of an old apartment tower and my tub won’t stop filling up with water. The building, weary from a century of American life, funnels its sewage down through my unit’s pipes until it all gets stuck up tight and rises with a fury, bubbling and nasty from the drain. For days, my every waking moment has been spent dumping bucket after bucket of the hot, dim water down the toilet and calling out for help. The calling out is pointless, of course, for what raw marrow remains of my voice gets trapped in my apartment, chipping at the paint on the walls, reaching no one. I know I would be furious—a half-starved monkey abandoned in a foreclosed amusement park—if I wasn’t sure deep down that I deserved this.Outside my bedroom window (left open day and night to minimize the build-up of moisture,) my unremarkable residential street has been overrun with a parade of screamers, all guttural grunts and challenges to fight discomforted passersby. At first the chaos left me unsettled, but as time passed and I dumped the water time and again, as I slept in fitful shifts on the cold linoleum tiling. Their thick-tongued cries sounded less like invading hellspawn and more like troubled family. I now love my feral kin as they howl, piss and rummage through the waste of the decadent, as they rage against society and the water rising quickly from the tub. I sing their praises as they set about their holy work and I mine, drawing strength from solidarity.One downside: there has been little time to eat. If I leave the tub unattended for an hour, the water recognizes my absence and rises twice as quickly. Fine, I think, for what is the body but water? I remind myself of the religious function of fasting; how it forges impeccable resolve within a human soul committed to its lessons. I admit, I am unsure which god can be accredited for flushing my cell phone with the bath water, for the dogged persistence of the cup to runneth over, but there is meaning in this for me, a message I must decode. Everything is water. Life is a cycle. A buried sin grows toxic flowers. I assure you, gods, I am listening!At night, I see-dream a polar bear squatting on a Caribbean coastline. His fur is matted with oily refuse and he is singing in a language I do not know. I am holding two halves of a coconut filled with milky juice topped with cherry blossoms. I hand the bear a juice and motion for him to drink it. His eyes sparkle with bright pain. The world may be shrinking, but all the good is gathering, I offer. No, he replies, there are just less good things. We drink our coconuts in brotherhood as the black tide comes rolling in.This juice tastes like shit, I think to myself, until I wake up and realize that the tub is flooding again. I rise, my pajama onesie soaked with backwash, and get to work. My back is sore and my senses are foggy and muted, but my muscles have learned their labor well these past few days. Twenty-seven flushes and at last the water is back below the rim, but the floor is drenched and so am I. This calls for towels.The door to the bathroom will not open. It has no lock, nothing to block it shut. It must be swollen from the water, I realize, and start to laugh. I tug and jiggle the doorknob, but the door will not open and I laugh a little harder. I slam my hands into the door, loose palm, closed fist, elbows and shin and forehead but the damn thing doesn’t budge. I’m not laughing but I hear my body laughing wild and loud, laughing like blood and I couldn’t stop it if I tried.Faintly from the other side I hear the glimmering jingle of keys and a shiver plays on my neck. A loud knock on the hallway door, footsteps and a voice, “Hello? Is anyone in here?” Another knock. “There’ve been several noise complaints, reports of howling?” I cry out for help, slamming myself into the bathroom door.“Alright, I’m coming in.” The sound of the keys again. The front door opens. “Oh, my goodness there’s water everywhere!”“Hello! I’m in here! Get me out!” I beg, weeping from relief. I explain the situation with the bathroom door and the tub and the days of interminable hardship and panic through the wood of the door.“I see. We should be able to help you out shortly. Have you filled out a work order yet by any chance?”I explain the fate of my phone, the days of panicked cries for help with colorful yet restrained poetic language.“Uh-huh. Well, I’ll place a call with our plumber, we should have someone out here in a day or two. Until then, do you have a hairdryer or space heater you could use to dry out the space a bit?”No.“Okay. Well stay put, help is on the way. We can discuss the cost of damages once this has all gotten settled, all right?”Outside, the screamers scream in concentrated numbers. The property manager stomps over to the open window facing out into the street. There seems to be a disagreement between the screamers growing in intensity.“Get a job, filthy ingrates!” He yells as he struggles to close the windowpane. He calls back to me, his voice raised, “Next time you get locked in the bathroom, be sure to keep these closed. Don’t want a security issue!”A shout. Glass breaking in the other room. I hear the manager stagger back from the window towards my bathroom door. I ask what happened, what that noise was, why the screamers now laugh with joy. “Help is coming! Stay put!” The front door opens and shuts with alarming speed. I press my hands to the door and feel heat from the other side. I am numb.Outside, the screamers cheer, “Shows that asshole! Throw another one!”A pause. Glass, heat, a sound like a thunderbolt five miles away, the piercing ring of the fire alarm from the kitchen. Above me, the frantic footsteps of evacuation. I take a step back from the door and slip, falling backwards onto the tile, by sheer luck avoiding hitting my head on the edge of the toilet. Thud. Terrible pain in my lower back as it strikes the floor, spasming from repetition, neglect and repetition.I lie there, unable to move. The screamers sing a drinking song as tenants flood into the street. Babies cry, dogs yelp and bark, frantic from the cacophony. I listen for the sounds of footsteps coming my way, for signs of help, but every human sound seems distant. The bathroom window! With great effort, I pull myself up off the floor. If I can get myself up on the rim of the tub, I can climb through the slim bathroom window, I can—The bars. The bars on the bathroom window.“Sure,” I nod and reply. I lie back down on the tile. It hurt to sit up anyway. I take stock of the situation, trying my best to think things through. Everything is water. My clothes are drenched. If the smoke starts entering the room, it’s best to be down on the floor with the oxygen. I should be safe until the firefighters arrive. The property manager will tell them just where to find me. Life is a cycle. The fire’s heat will dry out the bathroom door, enough to get it open. If I conserve my strength, I might be able to make it out. Is this the lesson I’m meant to learn, that a bad situation always leads to good in time? I think of my hard-earned wisdom, the bliss of a potential escape, the new life awaiting me on the other side of cleansing fire. After all, how did I end up here? A buried sin grows toxic flowers. You tricky gods. What sick root compelled me, hardship after hardship, to stay? All your dramatics, all your chaos, your unending parade of thwarted joys and heartbreaks, the whole blue pitter bill of the earth just to show me how powerful I really am! I am in your debt; I am your thankful servant and faithful pupil till the end! There is nothing to fear anymore. Nothing to fight. This is the ultimate freedom, the total liberation of the spirit!I hear a noise like copper groaning from below, a churn and bubbles, and all at once black water starts flowing from the tub, pooling over the porcelain canyon and flooding all around me as the crystal bathroom doorknob shines with the light of the fire. Distantly, my body again begins to laugh.
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ENTITLED TO FEEL SOMETHING DARK: AN INTERVIEW WITH SHY WATSON by Brad Casey

The first time I met poet and writer Shy Watson was after a reading in Brooklyn I’d organized in the summer of 2019. I’d heard of Shy for years, admiring what seemed to me to be a prolific amount of published work; within three years she had published dozens of poems, reviews, interviews, four chapbooks and a poetry collection. She was somehow involved in all the independent presses and magazines I admired: Metatron, Wonder, Bottlecap Press, Ghost City Press, Peach Mag, and Hobart as well as running and editing her own press: Blush Lit. And her work was deserving of attention. It’s present, it’s wanting, it has a quality about it like a compelling detachment, it shows the reader a world enfolding like a tour guide, a world morally ambiguous with sudden bursts of love, romance, nostalgia, and violence. A world fully her own. It’s hard to take your eyes away.

I’ve been lucky enough since then to come in and out of New York, to hear Shy read and share her work, to share dinner and wine together with mutual friends. And isn’t that a big reason we publish poetry? To share work and have fun with other poets? To talk with other poets? So when I heard Shy’s new book Horror Vacui (House of Vlad) was coming out I was eager to read it, to talk to her about her work. Horror Vacui is written in three parts. The first section, the longest, is made up of the Horror Vacui poems. The second, Waking Dreams, is a series of prose poems in which the world shifts and turns without warning. The third, Quarantine Diaries, is a down-to-earth accounting of personal daily events in New York within six weeks near the beginning of quarantine. Through the entire book is a desire for experience, a deep dive into the inner world, and an attempt to catalog a world outside the self that refuses understanding.

Below is the interview we conducted a few days before Christmas, 2020, as Shy got home from taking a COVID test. 

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Brad Casey: Hey! How are you? Where are you right now?

Shy Watson: I'm good! I'm back in Brooklyn but begrudgingly going to Missouri tomorrow (hence COVID test).

BC: How did the COVID test go? And how has Brooklyn been feeling?

SW: The COVID test was fine. I got it done at one of the walk-in clinics here in Brooklyn. People here either go to ModernMD or CityMD, and the two are across the street from one another which creates a kind of rival business effect, like Pat's vs Gino's. The line took three hours, but they brought out hand warmers. They said they'd call within an hour if the test was positive, so it looks like I'm in the clear. Usually, they email results regardless of what they are within 15 minutes but they said the computers are down. Brooklyn has been good, all things considered. I've basically just been spending time with my new boyfriend and working on novel edits! I'm very fortunate to live with roommates who I love during this time.

BC: So I loved reading Horror Vacui. I'm wondering what were the conditions under which you wrote it. When and where did you write it? Was it all in Brooklyn? Was it all written this year?

SW: It was mostly in Brooklyn, yes. But the first twenty poems or so were written between Cheap Yellow's publication (February 2018) and one year ago. The majority of it was written in the past year, though. A few of them were written in Mexico, where I stayed for a month to work on a draft of my novel manuscript last January. 

BC: I wonder if you find a difference in tone between the poems written in those spaces? Like what was written in Brooklyn before / after the pandemic started and also the poems from Mexico.

SW: I think so! I mean, I like the newer ones better, but it always goes like that for me. The end is a lot more prose-heavy, with the Waking Dreams & Quarantine Diaries, which was influenced by the fiction workshops I have been taking during the past year. 

BC: Why did you decide to structure the book this way? With the Horror Vacui poems to start, followed by the (if you'd describe them this way) prose poems from Waking Dreams and then ending with the Quarantine Diaries? They all shared a tonal similarity I enjoyed, it made sense, but I'm wondering about that decision on your part.

SW: I feel like the poems serve as kind of appetizers for the prose. Like, they're short and fun and kind of ease the reader in. Or maybe I did it simply out of habit because the prose in Cheap Yellow was in the back. I wondered if I should try to lure people in with the best stuff first, but instead, I kept it pretty chronological.

BC: Oh interesting! Because the whole thing is strong but I felt really pulled in by the poems. Like for me, the poems felt like the main feature of the book. I especially felt pulled in by the desire for experience that was being communicated through them. It didn't matter what kind of experience the speaker was going for, there was just a desire for anything, anything exciting to happen good or bad. You know what I mean?

SW: Yeah definitely! Wow, how cruel of me to release it during quarantine... Horror Vacui: The FOMO Book.

BC: Not at all! I think that want for experience is so strong right now, it's great to see it reflected. Like these lines stuck out to me: “thinking about how if i / threw my fist into a Picasso painting / something exciting would happen.” I think we all want to throw our fist through a Picasso painting right now. 

SW: Haha, truuuue. Especially after this new COVID relief deal.

BC: Do you find liberation in experience? And do you find yourself gravitating toward experience regardless of whether you think it will end well or badly? 

SW: Yes! And, I do. I was actually talking about this with a friend the other day, how I don't mind bad (though not traumatic) experiences, so long as they're interesting. Sometimes bad experiences end up being really funny later, or they teach you something about people or your relative place in society. But good experiences are always nice, too! Honestly, I want it all. 

BC: I feel similarly. And I think for me that comes in part from growing up in a small town very far away from any city then moving to a city as an adult. Which, you live in New York but grew up in Rogersville, Missouri and I looked it up and it's even smaller than my hometown. Do you think there's a connection there? Between experiencing a city as an adult who grew up in a small town, how you're more open to experience because it's still relatively fresh?

SW: That's an interesting theory! I remember my first time in New York, being on the subway and a Mariachi band got on board in full costume, the whole shebang, and everyone on the train was just staring at the ground or scrolling through their phones while I was giggling, taking pictures, and giving them money. Maybe there is something to the rural upbringing to urban living pipeline. My high school boyfriend calls me "the goth Kimmy Schmidt." 

BC: I guess this touches on something else I wanted to ask you about: I feel like the speaker of the poems is more concerned with contextualizing the outside world within rather than projecting an inside world out. Especially with the lines, “i made a point to look / at the leaves by your gate / and to remember them / exactly as they were / and not as I hoped / they would be” There’s no pretension of projecting feelings onto the situation but the other way around, taking what is outside and making it into feelings inside. 

SW: I think that's a goal of mine. I have a tendency to romanticize people, especially romantic partners, to idealize them and put them on pedestals. I think that poem in particular speaks a little to my awareness of that tendency, though. Like, it acknowledges the desire to romanticize me being dumped for the first time while in Brooklyn, sitting on a stoop, but the reality is that the leaves were ugly and kind of haphazardly stuffed in the chainlink. It was gross. And being dumped was gross. And the idiot I briefly dated was gross. Sometimes things aren't beautiful, which is a hard reality for me to accept, but I'm working to get there.

BC: One thing that popped up a couple times in the poems that, each time, had a definite feeling of inarguable beauty and romance was LA, like it felt like a fantasy ideal. What is it about LA that appeals to you to write about it in this way?

SW: I knew a boy at the time who wanted to move to LA, and his fantasy of it is very interesting to me. Though none of these poems are about Ben Fama, just look to his book, Fantasy, which has almost everything to do with LA! It's a phenomenon! And I love LA. My favorite place in the world is Jumbo's Clown Room. The backyards are loaded with fruit-bearing trees, and everyone looks like a movie star. Pomegranates just straight-up grow there! And the beach! And I love driving. Here I am now, just like that boy, going off about LA. 

BC: I hear you! The little amount of time I spent there, everything was like spiritually warmer and bigger? And I kind of liked the superficiality of it. But I wanted to ask you about the violence in the poems as well. One of the blurbs for the book is by Eileen Myles who calls your poems, among other things, “a little violent.” I really liked the lines “i wear happily / my little bruises / like joyous moths,” especially in relation to the little violence of your work, how it’s not always destructive. In fact, it often feels liberating. How do you approach commonly perceived negative emotions like anger and violence and how it relates to your writing and your life?

SW: I've been reading Bataille lately, so it's hard for me not to think of violence as a thrill because of transgression, or its approach toward the edge. But I think that, in terms of my poems, the violence is directed inward. I tend to be self-destructive, which I do find liberating. It's like, "Fuck it, today sucks, I'm going to smoke a cigarette and order a dozen cookies from Insomnia." When I feel angry, I want to listen to angry music, not anything that will cheer me up. For me, it feels good to fully revel in whatever feelings I have, even if they are angry or violent. In a way it's anti-combative to give into "negative" emotions, rather than to fight or control them. It's a kind of emotional submission. If I'm feeling something dark, I feel entitled to it and I'm going to let it course through me until it's done.

BC: That said, when I read “Doomsday” (a tamale / turned fragile / in the cruel passage / of time) I wondered: Are you getting softer with age? Are you the tamale?

SW: You caught me! I think I am in ways. After my mom gave birth to me, my dad started crying to insurance commercials. I think I'm going through something similar. It takes a lot to make me angry. And for the first time in my life, I'm considering marriage.

BC: Whoa! That's a big step! What does marriage look like when you consider it?

SW: It looks... nice. Quarantine has caused me to get comfortable with a quieter lifestyle. I honestly love being in a secure, healthy relationship and I never want it to end. I just keep listening to 90's indie rock and daydreaming about moving to a small town for an MFA program. I loved partying in New York, but COVID's got me appreciating and desiring stability in a way that I never have before. 

BC: I've been seeing that a lot, people in relationships that might have become vague in time are all moving in together and getting married. I think it's a big part of what we're going through.

SW: Maybe it's my Saturn return.

BC: On that note: I want to talk a bit about the Quarantine Diaries. It feels like making art in quarantine is extremely difficult because we still don't know how to contextualize this experience. You do a good job of it in the diary format here because the diary format, I think, doesn't necessitate making context of anything but the events of day. How do you feel about this section of the book? Is it a good representation of the month and a half in which you write? How do you feel about making art during the pandemic generally?

SW: I love the Quarantine Diaries because they speak to noticing beauty in the quotidian, which is all we really have right now. It was a good representation of that month and a half! I remembered what seemed important, and that's what I included. I feel like the pandemic is different for everyone creatively. Though I am not doing well financially, I have a lot of free time and a lot of emotional support from my roommates, my boyfriend, and my friends. I'm not immunocompromised or at risk of losing housing. Some people are though! Some people have kids who they have to get through online schooling. I don't know how they're doing it. But for me, I've been able to be productive. There's been ample time to work on creative projects, and there isn't much else for me to do if I'm staying inside.

BC: I heard someone say recently that they're not surprised that government has been so cruel and neglectful and monstrous! as they've been through this but to actually be here living through it, to see that monstrousness, it's amazingly fucked to experience it. Do you feel your work is political? You have one poem that overtly alludes to politics in "There is No Ethical Relationship Under Capitalism (after RRW)" but how do you feel your political beliefs play into your writing?

SW: I'm careful about politics because I don't want to speak to experiences that aren't my own. But as second-wave feminists would say: The personal is political. I can talk about my own conflicts with authority and the way that political structures impact my life, but I am scared to ever speculate about someone else's experiences or to write about them as if they're my own. I'd rather just listen and think through the roles that I play.

BC: These lines stuck out to me, regarding quarantine: “it’s a cold world that’s warming / where people stay inside / & confront their ghosts.” Has this been your experience in quarantine? Do you think, for those of us who are able to walk out relatively unscathed by COVID, this time will have a positive effect on us?

SW: Yes. I've learned a lot about myself, and have grown in many ways. I would of course prefer a world where millions of people weren't dying from a horrible disease, but I hope that those of us who are able to come out on the other side stronger do.

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A LOST AND WORDLESS FEELING by Becca Yenser

for Abby Vasquez

 

All of our friends are dying but they are the ones to blame, so we shut up about it and sit outside at their old favorite bars, drinking set-ups until we puke. The bars are named after animals or phrases: Red Fox, Crow Bar, Haymaker, Lost and Found.

Our friends shot themselves in one-room apartments, jumped from bridges, hung themselves from garage ropes. They had dark hair, shiny hair, green eyes, red beards, brown eyes, dimples, scars, cellulite. They stooped when they walked, or danced on bikes, or wore layered sweatshirts instead of coats. They played drums, drank beer, bagged groceries, sat houses, or watched other people’s children.

Our friends killed themselves but told us about it first, for too long, first in the winters, then in the summers. Winter: bleak but soon over. Summer: swimming and cheap beer and too many Fourth of July parties. We listened, didn’t listen, stopped calling, called all the time.

Our friends had ideas. They liked Marx, they liked Beauvoir, they hated Ayn Rand or loved her. They liked Beavis and Butt-head and Cake and were in love with sad, sexy singers like Karen O. They spit when they talked, they had bad breath, they wore Gold Toe socks from Sears and Roebuck, or maybe just Sears.

One of our friends stepped off the St. Johns bridge but wore her red cape so that she looked like a capital A going down. Everyone tried to rescue her, or no one did, and we kept swimming, or stopped, or held our breaths, or breathed too much, or went silent, or said, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus when we heard the news, that all of our friends were dead.

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DUCK, DUCK, OWL by Michelle Ross

The ducks are a pair—Mallards from the pond in the nearby park. Every evening, they claim the shallow end of the swimming pool, float in languid circles. They’re not threatened by the woman watching them from the canvas chair. They don’t even startle when she goes inside the house to pour more prosecco. 

The woman is a divorcée—she’s lived alone in this house twelve years. Her grown daughters transplanted thousands of miles away. Boyfriends have spent the night from time to time, but there’s no boyfriend now.  

The woman notes the elegant (pompous?) curve of the ducks’ breasts and necks. The male duck, with his gaudy, iridescent green head that seems snatched from another body, looks like an Egyptian god. The female, with that snippet of blue sash peeking from her wing: a beauty contestant. 

The woman imagines the ducks are her daughters. Some instinct they don’t understand draws them home each evening. 

Of course, even if this were true, as ducks, they wouldn’t recognize this as home; they wouldn’t recognize the woman as their mother. Ducks know nothing of filial obligations, and this is to be expected. This is an acceptable trait for a duck.

But: duck shit. In the water. On the cement around the pool. The woman worries about diseases. 

Also, on the phone, when her younger daughter calls to say she can’t visit that summer (she offers up excuses like items she’s trying to pawn to pay off an overdue bill—How much for this? How much for that?), she tells stories of duck multiplication. Two becomes fifteen then fifty. When the woman’s older daughter calls to reprimand her for the candy the woman sends her grandchildren in the mail, she says of the ducks, “You’re not doing them any favors, you know. The chlorine is bad for their skin. They’d be better off if you scared them away.”

The owl is plastic—made in China. It doesn’t even weigh a pound. But when the woman walks out the sliding glass door, the owl in her outstretched arms, the ducks fly away before she is even certain she wants them to. 

That night, and for many days and nights after, the woman’s only company is the plastic owl. Even after she hides the owl in the cabinet with the fire extinguisher, she feels its eyes always. They never leave her.

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