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FRIDGE by Xueyi Zhou

October 16, 2020

Say you just move into a new apartment. A freshly finished apartment with a lingering smell of paint. The apartment is not big but it’s your own, and that’s something. You work hard for it, wall by wall, for a tiny cell in a honeycomb. However, a bare box with only a man inside seems more like a lock-up than a lodging, which means now you need appliances. Your choices are limited by the small space and your thin wallet. But you decide to treat yourself, to get something nice. To make it cozier, more like home. You are torn between an air-conditioner and a fridge. An air-conditioner is important, especially when you are settling in a hot city. It’s unbearable most days, with the biting heat and the biting mosquitoes. However, a fridge sounds like money better spent. You grew up with a constant hunger and it pains you to see food go bad and get thrown into the bin. Also, you can take advantage of the AC late in the office after your boss leaves, since he never pays for overtime and hasn’t spotted anything wrong with the utility bill. The transaction is fair so long as you don’t press your lucky temperature too low.

You know what? Make it the fridge.

Now you’ve decided to buy a fridge as your first home appliance. That’s a big step. You need to choose carefully which fridge to bring home. Cheap fridges suck out more electricity and break down frequently. Besides, you don’t like the look of them. They are too tacky, with poorly-lined flower patterns pretending to be luxurious. The Japanese one looks inviting. Much more attractive, actually. Almost too perfect, too out-of-reach. You roam around the mall collecting sidelong looks and silent contempt from the saleswomen, still empty-handed. Then you see a bright white fridge at the corner tagged “on sale.” The price is marked way down due to a small scratch at the front door. You inspect its label to find that it was made in Germany. The suspicious low price now makes sense. You know how the Germans are. They take things very seriously. The fridge works well and you have a secret fondness for German products, for their reliability, even though you have never been to Germany, nor have you ever met a German. You take out your credit card and swipe away your next month’s salary and bring the fridge home. Back-breaking inconvenience for an extra saving of delivery fee makes it a sweeter deal.

You carefully place the fridge in the kitchen, the center piece of the puzzle. Your sweat forms a little mirror on the floor and you smell worse than the paint, but you don’t care. The fridge looks beautiful, even with the scratch. In fact, the scratch is what brings life to it, like a painting by Fontana, breaking the line between dream and reality. A cut from which life pours in and flushes out possibilities. The fridge fills the apartment and life fills you. You feel like you are not alone, a new feeling after your mother died. The fridge is freezing inside, but its surface is warm. You touch the scratch gently as if touching a wrinkle on someone’s face. The scratch is the only reason you can afford a nice German fridge.

Next you visit the supermarket. You spend rather generously, taking all quality food to the cashier without hesitation. A packet of Japanese noodles, a jar of Australian jam, and, of course, a bottle of Parisian water. They are not cheap but it’s OK, take a breath and loosen up a bit. You are holding the basket handle too tight as if those things could escape. You feel like you and your fridge deserve them. You two deserve something good once in a while. Don’t run away. You are allowed to have them. The girl at the cashier asks you whether you would like to have a free magnet. “Sign up for our membership and the magnet is yours. You can save 2% with every purchase.” You mumble to yourself what a rich-people’s scam, and you will not set foot in this pretentious supermarket again, but the magnet grips you at first glance. You recognize that it is the Golden Gate Bridge. Plus, what’s the point of buying a fridge without dressing it up with a magnet? You surrender your credit card and swipe again, carefully pocket the magnet and out you go on the road, with a bag of heavier debts.

You enter your apartment and open the fridge. It has the new fridge smell, somewhat similar to what you remember smelling in the hospital. A smell of nothing-ness, dominant by its absence, a smell you will never forget. You put all the countries into the fridge: Japan, Australia, France. All the countries you and your mother have never been to. Now they are all inside your new fridge. Oh, don’t forget, there’s one more: USA. You stick the magnet onto the front door, not to cover the scratch but to decorate it, and to be decorated. But wait, no, something is off. Right! You turn your wallet inside out and insert a tiny photo between the fridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a very tiny photo, taken a long time ago. The cheap ink keeps fading but you can still see the woman’s face, though faint, much prettier than the face you saw at the funeral. Suddenly you notice the fridge is as rectangular as a coffin. No matter where you are from—Japan, Australia, France, USA—eventually you end up inside a rectangular ice box. You are at lost for a moment until the warmth emitted by the fridge pulls you back. Everything has been improving, you think. You even have a nice German-made fridge now, with all the fancy countries in it. You stroke the scratch again and say thank you, and get ready to leave for work again. Before you go you take a reluctant final look, at the bright new fridge with a scratch, a Golden Gate Bridge and your mother and a world inside it. You look closer into the silhouette in the photo. The cheap ink is fading and the black is no longer black. It fades into a Chinese red, a color that reminds you of blood and good omens.

MALE ENDURANCES by Nora MacLeod

October 14, 2020

My college friend asked me out for drinks and named a bar equidistant to our offices and apartments. The last time I went there a dentist had hit on me with his Argentinian friend who claimed he worked for the CIA. The time before that I’d fainted on the sidewalk during a first date, it was the best date of my life. Arriving at the bar, I felt as though I was returning to the dumping ground of a dead body, coming back to touch his hair and maybe sit on his rotting face.

In a dream I felt I knew he was the one because he presented to me a pair of beautiful pink shoes and then proceeded to eat them—peeling them apart like sliced lox, wetting his face.

Men are always asking me if I’ve just made a sound.

I know a relationship is over when I am lent books.

He had raped his ex-fiancé and that wasn’t even a deal breaker on the first date, or the fourteenth.

I watched the men fighting on the screen and then the faces of the spectators beside me, all betraying a humorous indifference. And my date, I couldn’t look at him. Goosebumps came in waves and I shuddered, realizing that tonight he would beat the shit out of me in bed.

I said, I don’t know how to feel, I am a cold corpse. She said, Try acupuncture.

Somebody using Foley’s photo on a dating app—or it looks just like him, or I can’t tell—so I reverse Google-image-search the photo and swipe right and pray for a miracle.

Two men who know each other have said the same strange thing to me in bed, but I will not repeat it here.

By the time I got out of the shower he had prepared himself breakfast and was bent over his laptop. He felt safe in there, like a small, dirty, white dog, loved too much by someone, constantly at risk of rupturing and spilling his guts everywhere. Himself, neither filthy nor unhealthy, but his mind, his character, threatening uncanny flaccid explosion.

I’m annoyed when men I date or sleep with tell me that I have a cruel undertone or that I seem annoyed with everything they say or do. But I am truly disturbed to hear from a man that I am seeing now that I am kind, too kind and understanding, confirming my own worst fears and beliefs.

There is a kind of truth: I can tell a man that domestic violence spikes on the day of the Super Bowl and they nod and say, Oh. It does not matter if this is factually true because it is another kind of truth, one that is substantiated by the man’s reluctance to be moved.

He had escaped his head—it was an optimistic meditation on rebirth. I’m not so concerned with his head, but when it does enter my mind it is peeking out from between my legs dripping in more ways than one.

You know what is triter than a dream? Saying that dreams are uninteresting. I swear to god if you don’t take your hand off of your dick I am going to cut it off.

It isn’t about war—it’s about exhuming a dead man’s dick.

If you knock on anything long enough, it will become a door. I was specifically not expecting you.

I like not having a steady boyfriend because it means I have to carry less in my purse.

Manufacturing faith, manufacturing emotions. The best time to break someone is during the Christmas season.

He didn’t even come that night; I think he was high on cocaine. I didn’t mention to him that I’d had unprotected sex with three strange men earlier that month.

This was it. I’d been in the city long enough to be sitting in this bar with some guy, who loved this bar, the same bar where I met my ex years ago. The same restaurants, same haunts, all these guys liked the same drinks. And before my ex, I’d played pool in the back room with another ex, all three of these guys would grope me in the dark corners and pay for everything with cash.

I clutched my overly full stomach and let it come out in my skirt. I could appear believably three months pregnant.

At first I’d squinted to avoid the gory photos, but once the heat passed through my face I looked more closely at the series of tightly cropped video stills. While still alive, the face he assumed was disgusted—what other expression was there to have?

And the blade was so small. Not at all what I’d imagined. I thought a ‘beheading’ required a guillotine, a machete. That knife could have made it through TSA. He didn’t look like himself with his head shaved and his body in the wrong place.

In high school I published poems about the death of my brother. My favorite brother, my parents’ favorite. He called my mother from Iraq and she would cry for hours after their brief lovely talks. He never asked to speak with me and I was never mentioned. I’m so glad that my mother never took an interest in anything I did. If she had, the shitty poems would have tested our relationship.

I heard my brother’s voice as I remember it from the 9-1-1 calls on a news report that I’d watched online after a short ad for Sea World.

His shaved head looked filthy and the stuff came off on the palms of my hands. I asked, Do you want me to sit you up in the car? Do you want me to get someone? No words came to him. So I propped him up against his own rear wheel and went on.

A dead man’s doppelganger becomes undone by the hole in his pocket disappearing.

Looking at cell phone shame videos online of "Pervs Jerking-Off on the Subway."

I told him I’d had a miscarriage. I didn’t say it was his, but I didn’t say it wasn’t. His horror more so reflected his fear of me than his pity. That I would have been pregnant, that I would have carried a child long enough to call what had happened a miscarriage, that’s what stole his color. He would never think to cross me again, to even talk about this with another single person. I’d stolen something from him and without consequence. In truth I’d never been pregnant in my life. And this moment amounted to a belief that it was impossible to become pregnant.

Before I could catch my breath he turned out the bedside lamp. He grasped me and began speaking with a tone that I’d never experienced before. His voice was round and his heavy arms held me to make the sounds travel all the way through me. He said, When I was in college my sister died. She moved south with her boyfriend because he was in the Army and he strangled her. That night I slept more deeply than I had in recent memory.

He took out a drawstring bag. You don't want to know what's in here, he said. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t anything. I couldn't think or rather was resigned not to think. Then I looked, I focused on him, his arms. The way he held the bag away from his body, up at his eye level, was like he was greeting a baby.

I went downtown, down to my favorite neighborhood for shopping. I told myself that I had errands but really I was looking to indulge in a dress that I imagined I’d wear to the funeral of the man I was sleeping with. When I got out of the subway I checked my phone for the time and saw that he had texted me a vague message potentially threatening suicide. I doubt my pulse quickened because this had happened before.

There is nothing defining men from one another until one is severed from himself. I want you to carve out of me all the good stuff.

Then he sent me a picture of his erect penis looking dry and unappetizing in the flash. On it he had written my name with a black gel ballpoint, which was funny because my name means pool of sorrow. And I could imagine mere moments later that he’d produce from his own pen a splashy pool of sorrow, disappearing ink.

I printed out hundreds of copies of that photo on pre-addressed, stamped postcards and put one in every copy of his new book that I could find in lower Manhattan.

Do you remember when we were friends, I’m not sure we ever were.

The drink has an entire sprig of rosemary in it. Laughing, I say, I have no sense of humor about this. Laughing, my college friend recounts her break up.

“Do not fuck with a world sensation.”

ALTO by Kathryn M. Barber

October 12, 2020

We’ve spent this summer in your house, the one that belongs to your father, the one that’s brimming to the top with a hundred thousand ghosts. Memories haunt this house: your parents, still together; your brother, asleep down the hall; your college girlfriend, alive, her laugh echoing across the staircase. We sleep beneath a framed photograph of that girl you loved so much, the one whose car went off that bridge we drive across every day. She’s the only thing that reminds me you’re capable of love, that it can even exist inside you. The way you grieve her is the last living thing that makes me not afraid of you—and I am, I’m so afraid of you: I was afraid that night on the pier, that night out on the highway, every time your hand reaches for that handgun beside the bed. I’m afraid of the way you laugh when I’m angry.

The only time I’m not afraid of you is when you play the piano. Your fingers trace those keys you know by memory, and I worship the sound that comes out of it, bathe in it, roll it over on my tongue and suck it in and out through my teeth. It suffocates me, and I hold my breath. As long as that music is moving through you, you’re something else, someone else, somewhere else.

I quit playing piano when I was fifteen, when I could still hear the notes of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” coming from the piano in my parents’ old house, the one we lugged all the way from my grandmother’s house in Mississippi. My aunt would come from Richmond, and her fingers were the same as those ivory keys; she had grown up inside that Yamaha. You quit and you’ll regret it the rest of your whole life my mama said, and I didn’t believe her then but I do now, because I understand now that somehow, if I could still play, I wouldn’t be here sitting, listening to you. If I could make the sounds you’re making right now, I’d be long gone. If I could remember the notes written inside your hands, in your every vein, if I could remember how to be on my own, I wouldn’t need you.

I had four piano teachers, kept starting over time and time again. The first one, Mrs. H, taught violin and piano, and while I was waiting for my turn, I’d sit out in the horse stalls with her daughter, my best friend, and we’d brush the horses’ manes, braid their tails, shovel out the barn until her mama had to come outside and get me. We were eight and her parents’ house was on the state line, and because her parents’ bedroom fell on the Tennessee side, it was long distance for me to call her fifteen minutes down the road on the Virginia side. We only got to see each other at church on Sundays, when we’d share a Frostie root beer from the drink machine in the hallway, and it would taste sour in our mouths after Mr. Bowling gave us pieces of Big Red chewing gum on the way into the sanctuary. Her mama was my favorite until her daddy convinced the deacons to convince my daddy to resign his church and start over somewhere else.

There were two more piano teachers in between that first one and the last one, between missing shoveling those horse stalls with my favorite friend and the one who taught me I didn’t need notes to play music.

The last one was my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs Rodeheaver. She was Pentecostal and she told me she could teach me to play by ear and I didn’t believe her. She said we didn’t need to read music when we could feel it—said she could teach me to feel music in way it that my ears would hear it and my fingers would know how to play it , that all those years struggling to read music wouldn’t matter anymore, that I wouldn’t need those mnemonic devices Mrs. H taught me to remember which keys were which letters.

I didn’t mean to quit. I was just taking a break during tennis season; the practices kept conflicting. I didn’t mean to never resume those lessons in that Pentecostal church sanctuary at the bottom of the hill. I didn’t know then it was my last lesson. I can feel music now harder than I ever could back then, but I can’t remember how to make it come out of my fingers, can’t remember which ones go where and which ones make which sounds, can’t connect my heart to my head to my hands like she taught me to. That last day, we were standing by the piano, and Mrs. Rodeheaver was telling me to sing louder, sing louder, and my weak airy soprano voice squeaked and faltered. I couldn’t make the notes come out right. I could feel them, could feel them in every centimeter of me, couldn’t make them come out loud, strong.

Louder, she said.

I sang the note louder.

No, she said. Louder. From your diaphragm. From deep down inside of you. From the deepest parts of you.

I sang the note again.

Louder, she said. I want you to break these stained glass windows.

So I did, I did, louder, louder, louder. She kept making me sing that same damn note until we could both feel my voice coming back off those church pews. Until I felt like the secondary version of my own note could’ve knocked me over.

You’re not a soprano, she told me, grinning. You’re an alto.

I asked her why she didn’t just tell me that the first week we started, months ago. She smiled, made me keep singing those notes over and over until I found the strength of my voice, understood. She never really answered me, but she didn’t have to, I knew then what I know now: that sometimes you have to sing the wrong note over and over again until it comes out the right way and then you know things your brain could never have known because the music told you. Because the music told you. Some things you can’t know until the music tells you.

You’ve never heard me sing, never seen me inside any song except yours: the way I swing my body when your fingers glide across the piano I can’t remember how to play. Every song we listen to, every track we play, belongs to you,. None of it is mine. You don’t know anything of the basement I was lying in the night I fell in love with Deana Carter or the back porch where only Garth Brooks held me or the lined shuffles of my boots across that beer-sticky dance floor just off I-75. You’ve never heard my voice echo across a church sanctuary.

And you won’t hear the breath I’ll let out as I turn up my radio and drive away from your house for the last time. You won’t hear the songs I’ll sing a few weeks from now under North Carolina skies as I let you go—no, not you, the hope of you, what you could’ve been. What I hoped you were. You won’t be able to name the piano medleys in the songs that carry me to sleep. You’ll never know the ballads that fortify my bones, deteriorate my fear of you. You’ll never see the record player by the window, the screen that separates the porch swing from stacks of country records that remind me I am free I am free I am free.

For now, for tonight, you’ll keep playing the piano, and I’ll keep suffocating in you, and I’ll keep singing soprano. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll hear Mrs. Rodeheaver saying you’re an alto you’re an alto you’re an alto and I’ll sing that note over and over again until I remember who I was before you.

QUEER VISIBILITY by Brooke Kolcow

October 9, 2020

I disappear in large groups.

-John Elizabeth Stintzi, circa 2014

I know it’s starting when my legs begin to prickle like they’ve fallen asleep. They fade away and no one notices. My arms go next, numb from my fingers up to my shoulders. The beer I’ve been drinking falls to the floor and I wince. The bottle bounces once and rolls across the kitchen linoleum. Without legs, I can’t bend down and without hands, I can’t pick it up, but at least this time it doesn’t shatter.

Once, at a Halloween party in grad school, my cocktail glass broke when it fell and one of the poets sliced open her heel on a shard. She started screaming, someone noticed the blood, and someone else shut off the music. By the time a fellow essayist thought to turn up the lights all of me had vanished except for my shame. I later heard that the poet needed five stitches but she never learned my name.

My butt is always the easiest to go; I barely have a butt, though you wouldn’t know that from the way it shimmies into oblivion. Next, my clothes and skin go together into the vast unknown and I become glistening, raw guts and ticking heart; my central nervous system crackles against the air. No one recoils. Someone shuffles nearly through me on their way to the fridge and they don’t murmur sorry or look back. No one asks if I’m okay or if I need another beer.

Once, at a reading in my early twenties, someone did ask. If I needed another beer, I mean. A butch with rolled sleeves and a crushed pack of cigarettes sticking out of her breast pocket. She was holding premeditated beers and she squinted down the length of the space between her lips and my part-disappeared self and said, “I can hold it up for you.” Imagine what it’s like to ride on the back of a motorcycle without any arms or legs, with just a cheap belt keeping you from knowing what thanks prayer the crows recite before they eat. Imagine learning that the name of god is written in a language you can decipher through taste.

The remnants of my torso vanish all at once with a soft splosh, which no one else hears over their chatter and the clunk of beers on wood and the inoffensive acoustic playlist. A laugh peals through the exposed-brick apartment as my tongue wriggles and my eyes roll but then the laughter cuts off suddenly along with every other sound. My ears have gone. I open my mouth, help, but my tongue has already exited the building. My teeth click clack, dancing my skull into absence.

It has always been this way but it isn’t always this way. Sometimes I make it through an entire event and I’m in the pictures the next morning, my smile a tight clamp as though I’ve trapped my presence in my mouth and if I smile any bigger the hereness of me will escape through the gap between my front teeth.

No one at the party turns. They are too busy not noticing me. My wet eyeballs swing through the air, looking for someone, anyone to see them seeing everyone. Too late. The left one goes first, just closes in on itself. I am down to a disembodied wink and the passing thought that I should stop throwing parties. Then, nothing. Darkness.

I’ve never minded being invisible. But I don’t know how much longer I can stand to be nothing.

CONDEMNED by C. Cimmone

October 7, 2020

My mother smoked her favorite cigarettes in the kitchen. Smoke billowed out into the living room and crept down the halls. A small television muffled the evening news as the three of us chewed away at overdone meat. Splatters of hot bacon grease slid down our throats as my father hurried through tough threads of roast. He ran the tractor after supper; and my mother splashed hot water around in the sink as she yelled at me for not finishing the black-eyed peas. “Black eyed peas are good luck,” she’d belt.

Holiday evenings were much the same. “Too much sage is good for the gut,” she’d remind us, as she broke cornbread into a large dish. She made one dish without turkey for my father. She made a second dish for him to carry to work. She made a third dish for the rest of us. My brothers leaned against my mother’s kitchen cabinets, laughing at stories she let out in little slivers. Her hands shook with an audience, but my brothers’ wives smoked cigarettes in the kitchen, too, and she was happy to hand them her lighter across the dining table.

Sometimes, when the kitchen offered German Chocolate cake, my mother pulled out a foggy plastic bag filled with red dominoes. My aunt Rita laughed at my mother’s stories and my father shuffled the red chunks as loud as he could. The white dots banged into each other as my mother grinned, lighting another cigarette and shaking her head at my father. My father grinned at my aunt Rita and for a moment, we were glad my mother was not mixing or wiping.

When the kitchen was empty, calls would come in. My mother pulled the long, curly line across the kitchen floor. The line tapped the linoleum tiles as she rested in her kitchen chair. The crisp cellophane crinkle of cigarettes held until she announced, “Dorothy has died.” My father and I watched the television in silence on these evenings of grief; and the kitchen gears paused.

After years of the kitchen exhausting itself between moppings and meals, crying children and daily newspapers, my mother’s bones stuck here and there. Her fingers cracked like eggshells and her eyes served as measuring spoons. She crept down the hall and curled herself into a bed, hidden away in the back bedroom. Her kitchen chair sat empty as black tar spilled like burnt grease down my mother’s face.

With no oil, the kitchen gears began to rust. The linoleum on the floor began to peel up at the edges and the oven hinges refused to do anything but screech. The dining room table began to collect crumbs along its midline and the closed cabinets held their breath of cigarette smoke. The lights from the ceiling began to sag, long screws pulling heavily from the sheetrock. Everything in the kitchen sagged. Everything moaned.

My father sat alone with his grief. The living room chugged along with his vanilla wafers and tiny wrenches. He took the phone from the wall, wound its long cord around the base and the receiver, and placed it in the hallway closet. He took his meals at the coffee table, as the refrigerator--now empty--hummed in place of the kitchen’s small television. The sink tarnished near the drains, but still overlooked the window as, “having a window over your kitchen sink is good luck.”

The roaches crept in as the lights began to flicker out of life and a rat made his home in the bottom of the oven. Pale acidic powder grew from behind the hands of the clock and the kitchen counters began to rot out small crevices for new life to sneak in with sticky legs. Like a dying branch, the kitchen darkened and calloused. The remaining pieces of the house were still green and growing, as the kitchen bore a hole right through its center.

“FLYING” by Michael Seymour Blake

October 4, 2020

…

THE EXPLODING TREE by Kevin Richard White

October 2, 2020

She’s feeding you remains of her meal. Like you’re some animal child.

There’s a tattoo of an exploding tree on her back and right shoulder blade: black ink like paint splatter on her smooth skin, roots pulled up, snapped branches, drifting leaves that become new birds. Hair covers it, but not often.

One day, you woke up, and it was there. You were angry about it at first, but then you realized you had a lot in common with that tree: You both couldn’t move and had nowhere to go fast.

You open your mouth. You want more of the dry chicken she has cooked, but she has thrown it away. You beg to suck on at least a bone, but she whispers, “No.” She takes you out of your chair and lays you down on your belly. You’re a fish again, one of your favorite playtime activities.

After she got the tattoo, you watched from the bed as she cleaned it, kept it moisturized, watched the pitch blackness brighten her skin. You wish you had hands to help her, or at least trace it, make a shape of it to keep. But you watch. And shake. How can something so artistic be out of your grasp. She continues to smooth her skin and you want to scream.

You’re a man of broken parts. She’s your mechanic. Somewhere, along the line, the manual will be written to make you a new human being again. It could take days or years, but she has promised you, in soft voices, that you’ll have hands again. That you’ll have it all back. But you think and never tell her that you’re past the warranty date.

On your belly, you imagine you’re a guppy, cascading through dark warm water. She rubs your back and shoulders, trying to get knots out. Perhaps she is trying to give you a tree tattoo of your own, you think. You try to say this, but fish don’t talk, and so you just continue to think you’re swimming until she’s done.

She could have left a long time ago, you told her once. There’s no need to take care of me like this. But she smiled. And in response, she whispered, “Well then, who would take care of me?”

After you’re done being a fish, she goes to get you ready for bed. Pajamas on, teeth brushed, and sets up the laptop for you to use. She puts the mouth operated mouse in and you’re good to watch movies for as long as you want. She goes to get ready herself for her job. You watch her undress. The tree is there, shining. She puts on her black dress and bracelets and brushes her hair. She leaves the tree visible this time, usually covering it up. That’s when you can’t take it anymore. You spit out the mouse.

“Don’t let anyone touch that tonight,” you say.

She spins around, still brushing. “Touch what?”

“Your tattoo.”

She smiles. “You’re a silly boy.”

“I’m serious. It’s yours. Don’t let anyone touch it.”

“It’s yours, too, baby.”

She comes over and kisses you. The smell leaves you breathless. Your mechanic. The one who feeds you. The one with perfect hands that are replacing yours.

She puts the mouse back in so you can operate the computer again. Before she leaves for the night, she kisses you one more time and wants you to sleep well. She’ll be back later, she says. The door shuts. You’re still hungry but have to wait.

After some time, you fall asleep, thinking you’re still a guppy. Back through rivers and past sharks, you’re going towards some kind of light. When you get there, it’s a small island, white sand, shells and crabs. But there’s one tree. A large black one that reaches to the ceiling of the sky. Suddenly, you’re an animal, climbing up. You get to the top. Leaves drift and become birds. You want to do it as well. The tree gets blacker against the blue sky, and you reach a claw out, breathing hard, wishing it becomes a wing. They all continue to softly drift up and over the water, and as you pray to fly, you hear an explosion from under you, bomb-like. Something lifts. You fly, but not well.

TRIPTYCH OF FALLING STARS by Wayland Tracy

September 30, 2020

Every night I hear the screams of myself far away. I beg for help but I will not help. In a ditch by the tracks, full of golf balls and bones of careless creatures. White quartz set in circles. I lie down and I am falling. Can’t find the earth. The noises of town rattle like deathbed confessions. Trains hurtle past. The stars encroach. We once had lights that prolonged days. I scrounge for bones with meat clinging on. I once had a table. Pictures of people stuffed into cracked walls, maps that do not help me. No children anymore. Hawks fly full-on head first into trees. Cats and dogs are buried, dug up. Men scream and tear at their own bodies. Become puddles in the streets. My dreams pound my head in continuum of the day. Day pours out of night. A single gunshot every hour. I know what berries will kill me. I’ve buried strangers but I do not kiss them anymore. I howl on my back. Coyotes smell my piss and hope I don’t get up. I found my mother with a meteorite lodged in her heart. My father runs north following the deer. I pick up a golf ball and throw it into the sky. Rabbits cry in their dens. The man who counts crawls into my ditch. The golf ball becomes a star. I poisoned a woman at my table. I beat a dog. I cut the leg off a boy and threw it in the river two days later. Please believe me. The star falls, then the rest.

Through the fields and hills, far away, I follow the deer. I carry a rifle and one bullet. They know my purpose. I eat the grasses and berries they eat. I drink from the streams they drink. I shout at wolves. I carve faces. I follow the descent of owls, the little screams, circling vultures. Lights of unnatural color move among the stars. I write to my wife and son. Letters placed in the hollows of trees and under rocks. A gray man followed me for three days. He scared the deer. A fawn nuzzles my head. I hold it and weep. I cut its side to remember. I eat mushrooms glowing at night. I sleep while I walk. The head of a buck seared to a meteorite. I pray. I burn my clothes. Snow sticks to my skin. Wolves seduce the fawn. The gray man returns. He speaks through the steaming stones, words of my voice, a mirror of ice, one man drowning. The deer wait for me. I beg them forward. I point my gun and the gray man charges.

I long to be the woman of the candlelit painting, floating in a river. All my blankets are gone. I scrape mold from cheese. I wear curtains, sit in corners. A boy climbed to my roof and has not come down. My neighbor tells me she intends to go to the moon without her husband. I never trusted her. Never open the door. I wave a revolver at a mouse. It was my husband’s. Coyotes sit on my porch every night, scratching the door, shaking the handle. I tell them about my day. I chew on salted wood. My father plays me his harp. He sits in the tree outside the kitchen window every morning. I knew it to be him right away by his smile. Such a smile you don’t see anymore. I cannot bear the noises. I tie rags around my ears. I hum till my throat is sore. The coyotes leave when the census man comes. I show my gun through the window. My father shows me the place I must sit when it is time. I watch my neighbor kneel on the tracks. The census man slips papers under the door. I burn them. I know of a place where the floors aren’t cold, where I might see my family again. I whisper into black holes, to mice no longer gathering my hair. Scurry now, friends. I confess. I sing in the fire of paintings, the clouds of heaven. The shrieking sky opens.

NORA LIVES IN PIECES by Mason Parker

September 28, 2020

Everything crashed into its true form following the blackout in New Orleans when Nora missed her flight and we drove to Little Rock, buzzing as trashy manic fairies. The Ozarks flopped and rolled, redefining themselves every few miles. Nora had proposed to me after pissing on the fence of an electrical transfer station somewhere outside of Austin where the grass grew through the chain link. I laughed at her, and she said, “I’m fucking serious, mate.”

“You wouldn’t want to marry me, Nora.”

“Fuck man, I love America. We could get dual citizenship.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it. I’m a difficult person.”

We forgot about it driving all the way to the bayou after picking up three Adderall from a Phish fan off 6th street. We made it to Lake Charles, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. When I laid down, I couldn’t sleep. The next morning, I-10 was closed, and we didn’t get to New Orleans until dark. It smelled wet, and Nora’s eyes swallowed everything around her.

In those years, when we were bumping up against each other, it never registered how the interactions were shaping things. I was pushed up against myself and wanted to torment everyone around me. Torment, perhaps, is not the right word, but shape, engineer—that’s more accurate. I just wanted to take up emotional space. There was nothing intimate between us, because I had laundered all my affections for someone who viewed me as a bridge to carry them over those chasms between bouts of Real Love. In those moments they were afraid of falling, of being consumed by loneliness.

We checked into a hotel in Baton Rouge and caught a cab to the French quarter.

The cabbie said, “There’s been a lot of robberies lately. Plenty of cab drivers getting their cashboxes stolen. That’s why I carry this…” He pulled out a .50 caliber pistol from the center console.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” said Nora. “Did he just pull out a huge gun? Holy shit that is so fucking American. I have never even seen a gun before.”

From some angles the firearm was a shadowy, invisible thing, and from others it glistened with a mechanical beauty under the spectrum of neon lights piercing the window tint as we drove down Canal street. Stepping out of the cab there were two mingling bodies engaged in an acrobatic performance. They seemed to be merging, appendages growing from one another, legs and arms like fingers woven together.

By most measures, it was a bad trip. Everything had gone wrong. But I finally came to recognize Nora as she was—a movement I could not control, floating into my life in Prague where she had a fuck you tone toward everyone but me, and I never understood why. Nora became a perceptible junction of turmoil amid an expanse of purposelessness. Then the big blur came, and I woke up to an alarm clock.

“We need to get you to the airport.”

“Just a bit more sleep then.”

We woke up two hours after Nora’s flight took off. The first leg of her trip back to London. She called the airline. She could get home if we made it to Little Rock that afternoon. It was a tedious drive through the swamps, and the humidity hurt my head. We listened to Christian talk radio explain why transmogrification was not weird. The roads remained clear, and we made it in six hours.

As she got out of the car, she said, “The offer will always be on the table. I will leave my future husbands for you. So, just let me know.”

I smiled at her, “I’ll let you know, Nora.”

On the drive home, I was alone and I-40 was long. The Ozarks gave way to the plains—a yellow, dry surface endlessly inhaling the landscape. I thought of Nora on her flight, pestering some old man sitting next to her, coaxing him into three whiskey shots. I haven’t seen Nora since that afternoon, but when I think of her, she appears to me as countless swirling pieces. The car was quiet then and I heard only the humming of the asphalt and the air as I breathed in and out through my nose. On the edge of the west, there were clouds.

LISTING by Michael Todd Cohen

September 25, 2020

MARBLEHEAD, MA — ESTATE SALE BY YOUNGEST SON 4 bedroom / 4.5 bath with 5,679 sq ft. of ample space for nuclear family on .26 acres.

Below listed are the items for sale and a description of the property. Not listed but offered for the specific buyer: being told as a child you would be disowned if gay.

BASEMENT Offered in sale: workbench at which father and youngest son built miniature soapbox derby car for Cub Scout competition. Mostly father—who hip-checked son saying,

“watch out, watch out,” as his hulky frame jostled miniature car parts into a sleek red bullet. Son did not win derby. A warm, enveloping hug was given as compensation along with the statement: “They cheated. This is bullshit. I saw the guy squeeze the wheels before he put ours on the track.”LIVING ROOM The ground floor affords a large living room with tile floor in good condition despite the dog’s old-age accidents which could not be prevented because the slight-voiced mother couldn’t yell without coughing. Honestly, it was for naught with a deaf dog.

Offered in sale: a 47” television cabinet. We regret we can’t offer a larger television, but the mother cried when the father brought home a 50” to watch golf on because it “overwhelmed the space."

Additionally offered in sale: a well-loved reclining chair swathed in striped fabric to be deodorized, prior to sale, of what the father referred to as medication-induced “chemical farts."DINING ROOM An open plan allows for a sizable dining table next to the kitchen. This is not offered as part of the sale, but it is not hard to find a dining table to fight around.

Offered in sale: double-sided fireplace with slate ledge. Ledge has some wear from mother standing on it to reach father’s lips for a kiss—silent and sweet—while youngest son looked on and wondered what boy he would kiss on a ledge or a stoop or a doorstep one day and what would happen when he did.

FAMILY ROOM Offered in sale: a Bose sound system and a sun-bleached blue couch where the father lay in semi-darkness listening to Enya after returning from chemo sessions in Boston.

KITCHEN Boasting an abundance of natural light, the kitchen offers overhead and under-counter cabinet space containing a red pitcher, drinking glass and bag of rice that the mother used to teach the youngest son how to pour neatly from one vessel into another, her hand over his in gentle guidance.

Offered in sale: a double-door refrigerator with room for two shopping bags filled with live lobsters that the father often lay onto the cold floor tile in a mock “race” despite youngest son’s whinnies of fearful protest.

You will hear the ice dispenser on the fridge churning from time-to-time, like when the youngest son came down to the living room in the middle of the night for lack of sleep and saw his dead father on the television guffawing in the audience of a comedy festival he attended the year before. It was Father’s Day. God has a bizarre sense of occasion.

BEDROOMS Up three easy steps are four bedrooms of good size, including a primary suite.

Off the hallway is a small office, formerly “maintained” by the mother, with tax papers and medical bills exploding outward like a burst whitehead. Papers to be removed prior to sale.

To the left is a bedroom with an orange shag carpet and an en suite bathroom including shower stall. Offered in sale: a full-length mirror with some smudging from where the youngest son mashed his face into it, stared himself in his own eyes, and said, “I’m gay.”

Also included: a laptop with a start-up screen featuring a picture of actor Chris O’Donnell, a twin-size bed with salvageable springs that weren’t put to the test with much more than sweaty solo action while thinking about actor Chris O’Donnell, and a small sound system with CD tray and radio used to drown out the father’s intermittent vomiting in the primary bedroom.

DRIVEWAY Asphalt in good condition with minimal wear from garage sales, car washes, a Bar-Mitzvah party and the night the youngest son confessed his truth to the oldest brother and stopped there, forgoing his own peace of mind for peace in the moments he had left with the father.

Offered in sale: repeating he knew anyway in your head as a salve.

GARAGE Space for two vehicles, including champagne colored 1997 Chevy Blazer offered in sale. Blazer is in good condition with 38,000 miles from youngest son driving away regret: Essex antique shops, Danvers strip malls and the Marblehead Lighthouse, staring into a roiling sea. There are minor grip marks on the steering wheel from where he bore down; knowing a thing and trying to unknow it.

PRIMARY BEDROOM Cavernous space with a glamorous oversized wood-paneled walk-in closet.

Offered in sale: the father’s clothes that hang like meat in a butcher’s freezer—stiff and gruesome.

Not included in sale: a California king size bed that the mother will take with her to the house in Swampscott so she can sleep in the same divot she’s made over thirty years and sometimes run her hand over the one he made too; like an incantation to bring him back.