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Cass Francis 9/13/24 Cass Francis 9/13/24

Cass Francis

My creative work often explores fractured identities, distant connections, and a sense of place in a highly mediated world. This series of acrylic paintings are mostly based off photos I took while exploring my home state of Texas. “Movie House” represents a beautiful theater near Sundance Square in Fort Worth. In reality, the theater is surrounded by urban downtown buildings—but I stripped those out of the painting to leave it with an isolated and slightly spooky feel. “In the Dark” does not come directly from a single photo or real place, but instead is a play on how in our media-saturated world sometimes media play reflections of us for its own sake. “Passerby” is a tryptic showing the different points of view of a building I photographed in Marfa, Texas. As with the movie theater, I stripped out the surrounding buildings and landscape to isolate the building and make it seem dreamier and more surreal. Pretty simple, this one just means that things change shape as you pass them by.

These pieces were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Georgia Smith 9/13/24 Georgia Smith 9/13/24

I Cannot See You the Same Way

It was the first meal in the new apartment, and I had unconsciously made the foolish assumption that the configuration of the stovetops aligned with the stovetops in my previous apartment, so when I turned on what I thought was the top left burner and then distracted myself for eight minutes waiting for the pasta to boil, I was surprised and devastated to return to find the noodles soaking in cold water and the plastic grocery bag half-liquified and melting into the bottom left burner.

God, it was stupid. And I was also stupid. It was one of those mistakes so flagrant and avoidable that it makes you aware of how ill-equipped you really are, how often the logic and good sense that you rely on can just fail you completely. But then, here’s a thought: by calling your own self stupid, you are in a way splitting yourself into two different people—the one who is stupid and the one who is smart enough to recognize that he is stupid. The plastic was seared into the glass of the stovetop in layers. It had been so beautiful, shiny as marble. And now I had defiled it. It’s the type of thing Margot would have been triggered by. She wasn’t a neat freak exactly, but she liked things to be kept up well. Hated bits of dried food, lint left in the dryer filter.

It was a six-step process, according to the internet. Nothing was allowed to be easy.First, you coat the stovetop with olive oil and baking soda. Let it sit for a few minutes. Then wipe that off with a warm cloth. Then clean the stovetop with dish soap and water. Then coat the plasticky bits with rubbing alcohol. Let that sit for a minute. Then use a wooden spatula and a razor scraper to scrape off the plastic. Then clean it all again with soap and water. I tried all those steps, then tried them again in different orders. Barely got any plastic off. Eventually, I found some forum thread that said you have to heat the stove back off to melt the plastic a bit. I tried that, then scraped it off with my fingernails, which took maybe a good ten minutes. After all this, I couldn’t even say I was too hungry for pasta anymore.

The apartment was so quiet. It was fall, and the sun was already going down so early, so by seven, the slice of sky I could see was dark and slate gray. After dinner, I resolved to spend an hour unpacking and then reward myself with Final Fantasy until it was time to go to bed.

I called my mom to let her know how the move was going. She asked when I was going to get a dog.

“It’ll help you meet people,” she said, and I could hardly think of anything sadder.

The first time I saw Margot, the thing I noticed was her size. She was a small girl, smaller than anyone I’d been with. Six foot three and on the heavier side, I typically tended to attract bigger-boned women, as my grandma would say. Margot couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. She stood out to me because she didn’t follow any trends. Didn’t care at all what was fashionable, really. When I first met her at Cole’s pregame, she was wearing a lacy white tank top and grey jeans that weren’t tight enough to be sexy or baggy enough to be trendy. Her face was bare and shiny, and her curly dark hair was in a low ponytail. It sounds harsh, but she was the kind of girl who might be accompanying a much more glamorous friend, who becomes the object of your friends’ attraction until they get too drunk to remember her name. From the way she dressed, you probably would have thought she was timid. But she wasn’t at all. She helped herself to a seltzer from Cole’s fridge and asked me if I’d like to be her pong partner.

“I haven’t played in a minute,” I mumbled.

“That’s all right,” she said. She smiled broadly and her teeth had these strange little pointy edges to them that I found quite beautiful. She introduced herself.

“I’m John,” I said, holding my hand out for hers to shake, which, looking back, was idiotic of me, but she didn’t seem to mind.

We lost every game of pong. I was too self-conscious and too sober to ask for her number. Her friends slipped back into the conversation, and the girls all headed out to another party, and there was simply no good time for it. So, a few days later I followed her on Instagram, and she followed me back. She had been the first one to make a move, so it was my turn—I understood this much of the dating code.

Cole didn’t know much about Margot, but when I asked him about her, he said she was a “Smart chick. Engineering. Chemical I think.”

We traded messages on Instagram back and forth. I asked her what type of music she likes, and to my surprise, we had similar taste: MGMT, Beach House, Pond. She said she liked “basically anything but pop,” and that I could work with. I mentioned something about her coming over to see my synth setup and she didn’t respond for about an hour. I thought I’d ruined everything by suggesting something so niche and nerdy, but she responded that sounds dope! and it felt like I’d won the Olympics.

I had no clue what girls liked to do on dates. What do smart chicks do, besides study? Do they like romance, being treated to expensive Italian dinners, flights to exotic locations? I didn’t have too much to offer in that department. Our first real date was to my friend Austin’s show—he was playing in a new-age band called Zenith Zenith, and they’d gotten a gig at a local dive bar. It was 21+, and Margot said she didn’t have a fake, but she didn’t mind them just drawing the X’s on her hands.

You sure you want to go? I had messaged her before we met up. The self-saboteur at it again.

Yea!! It’ll be a good time :) she responded.

It was little things like that from the start. She made me feel like I wasn’t saying the wrong thing. She didn’t question why I sometimes paused between sentences or didn’t have a snappy response to her joke or looked down at my watch in nervousness when she asked a serious question. She had the power to make me feel like a real man, someone who could romance a beautiful girl, someone who deserved to be loved and taken seriously. I had never really felt like that before.

We met outside the door. It was a chilly night, and she was wearing a pink motorcycle jacket, grey jeans, and converse. She gave me a side hug, and I noticed she was shaking a bit, and I thought, good, maybe I am not the only nervous one. Or maybe she was cold. She bopped along to the music and came up with nice things to say about Austin’s bass playing.

“He’s a great guy,” I said. I wanted her to think I had lots of friends.

After the show, we went to the fried chicken restaurant next to campus that stayed open until midnight. I asked her about her major.

“Chemical engineering must be a ton of work,” I said.

“Oh, it’s miserable. Probably my biggest regret,” she said.

She explained that growing up, her older brother Patrick had always been the “smart one,” and she had been the try-hard little sister who could hardly keep up, even when she’d taken seven AP courses and gotten into MIT (though she hadn’t gotten a scholarship, and it was too expensive). She’d picked chemical engineering, in some ways, to make a statement against Patrick’s lesser but still impressive biomedical engineering degree.

“Only two more years to go,” I said.

She asked about my major—for the first time I was almost embarrassed to say I was a biology major. But I told her about my love for ocean animals, the first time I went to an aquarium back in Tennessee and seven-year-old me stared at the jellyfish for an hour until my mom dragged me out, how I would count down for Shark Week each year. They didn’t have a marine biology program at Georgia State, but it was the best college I’d gotten into, so standard-issue biology would have to do.

“That’s pretty cool,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go snorkeling. I think stingrays are so cool.”

“I’ll take you snorkeling one day,” I said. I meant it. Wherever she wanted: the Gold Coast, Maui, the Maldives. Suddenly, I wanted to be the type of man who could afford such trips.

We kissed that night in the parking lot after I walked her to her car. I didn’t ask her to come back to my place. I wanted to leave the night on a perfect and pure note. She drove away in her red Honda Civic and I began imagining a dream version of our future together. Two weeks and four dates later, we were exclusive. Another month, and it was official.

We had sex for the first time on our sixth date. She invited me back to her dorm room, turned the lights off, and sat on the bed.

“You can have all of me,” she said.

I kissed her very gently. I wanted her, badly, but I didn’t want to do anything that made her uncomfortable. In my mind, she was delicate, something to be touched with care and precision. She ran her hands down my back and began to take her shift off. Afterward, she’d been snuggling with me, her head on my chest, and I noticed her eyes were teary.

“Are you okay?”

I was terrified in that moment that I’d hurt her somehow, been so consumed by my own brutish pleasure that I had no clue she was in pain.

She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Yes. Sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No. No, you did nothing wrong,” she said and wrapped her arm around my stomach, curling herself into a tighter ball. I didn’t bring it up again. Every other time after that, she was all smiles and gasps and moans.

As I got to know her, I discovered that Margot was actually a bit of a nerd. She watched Attack on Titan, Cowboy Bebop, shows my marching band friends from high school were always going on about. She liked card games and would excitedly research new ones for us to try, spend thirty minutes explaining the rules to me, and never let me win.

She didn’t care much for frat parties but had no problem downing tequila shots. Her tolerance was much lower than she believed, and I’d usually end up dragging her out of parties and helping her brush her teeth by 1 AM. One night, after accompanying a friend to a theater party, she stumbled home to my dorm and knocked on the door. She was leaning against the doorframe, her eyes glassy and unfocused.

“My love,” she said.

I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her inside.

“You guys had fun?”

“Not without you,” she said and kissed me before collapsing onto my bed. I laid down next to her and took her hand.

“I don’t care about anything out there. Not when you’re here,” she said. It was then that I decided I would marry her one day.

Three years later, we’d bought an apartment together in Marietta. Margot had gotten a stressful but well-paying job at an environmental lab, and I was a clinical research coordinator for a Veterans Affairs medical center. We kept busy. Margot had gotten quite adept at cooking—we both liked trying out new dishes and twists on recipes. I worked from home most days, so I kept the apartment clean and the fridge stocked. We lived well together, fit neatly into the unique puzzle pieces of each other’s lifestyles. We experimented with new board games, new restaurants, new plants to hang in the office, new sex positions. We spent Christmas and Thanksgiving together, and I was convinced her family actually liked me. My mom loved Margot, probably thought she was miles out of my league. I’d consulted my mom when I picked out the ring. She’d asked me a long series of questions, like if I got one detail wrong then the ring would prove I was not worthy of Margot.

“Does she wear gold or silver jewelry? Is her style always more modern? She knows about science—do you think she cares if it’s lab-grown? Do you think she’d prefer a natural diamond? I think she wears a lot of color. Does she maybe want a colorful gem?”

I’d decided on something simple, classic: a gold band, one-carat natural radiant-cut diamond. It was beautiful, shiny, authentic, like Margot. It cost me eight thousand dollars.

I had it all planned out—I would propose to her on our trip to Hawaii in June, on the beach at the sunset’s golden and glowing peak. It was the week after I’d bought the ring that things went wrong. Looking back on it, maybe the gleaming ring was like an omen: a sign that I had wanted too much, mistakenly let myself believe I deserved an easier, more perfect life than I did. I kept the ring in its box, tucked away inside a paper bag, which I stuffed at the bottom of our bins of extra clothes beneath the bed. It loomed under me like the pea beneath the princess’s pillow. I could never forget it was there.

It was a Sunday. Margot was stressed about a presentation at work she was due to give the next day. She was cycling through her PowerPoint again and again, entering a state of quiet focus that she often adopted during moments of stress. She wanted to have me run to the grocery store to get things for dinner, a risotto recipe she’d found online and wanted to try.

“I think I made a list in my notes app. You can text it to yourself,” she said.

So, I opened the app. It was on the home page with little snippets of all her notes. The top one listed button mushrooms, heavy cream—and just a few from the top, there was one that started. 1. Aaron. I opened it.

It read:

Aaron
Kendall
Rico
Thomas
Neil
Liam
Weston
Jonathan W
Ian
Andrew – I think??
Justin
Mal
Frederick
Neil P.
Bo
RJ
Kristian
Jackson
Jon R.
Ryan
Tyler
Sam - film class
Cory
Connor
Greg L.
Alejandro
Jeff
Troy
Kamal
Christopher
Garrett
Zale
Walker
Tom J.
Bernie
Charlie
Jake
Grayson
Owen
Cooper
John

It took me a few seconds to understand what I was looking at. The essential things I processed were: a list of 41 names and mine at the end. I stared at it for a few moments, my mind gone numb and silent, and then closed it out and clicked on the grocery list and tried to pretend I’d never seen it.

But it was that moment that changed everything. Later that evening when Margot made the mushroom and chicken risotto for dinner, I couldn’t even bring myself to start a conversation with her. I just nodded along and reacted to whatever she talked about, and it was clear enough to her that something was off.

“Are you okay? You’ve been really quiet,” she said.

“No, I’m good. Just been a long day.”

“A long day of World of Warcraft and lounging around in the bed,” Margot said faux-sympathetically.

“You know. It takes it out of me.”

I tried to keep up our banter, our trademark loving and wry way of speaking to each other. But the list was pulsing inside my brain and my heart and not letting a single cell in my body rest. Across the table from me, she looked so small and innocent. She hardly wore any makeup, and the downturned slope of her dark eyes and eyebrows gave her the permanent appearance of sweetness and vulnerability.

The truth is, you could put a trillion different truths in front of me and have me believing in them all at once. Margot was still the woman I loved, the woman who made me a better person than I was before—more organized, more motivated, more thoughtful, more capable of sharing and understanding my feelings instead of squashing them like a roach. But how was it possible she had slept with forty men before meeting me?

I could recognize that part of this could be my own insecurity. I had only had one girlfriend during my senior year of high school, and the relationship lasted only four months. Besides that, I had two one-night stands in college and one recurring “friend with benefits,” for a whopping total of four. I had never given it more than a moment’s thought. Sure, she’d been with other guys. It was college, that’s what college girls do. But there’s a difference between having a vague awareness of the thing and seeing forty-one names on the list.

Margot sat across from me, her small serving of risotto, her dark eyes sparkling, her mouth curled to the side the way she does when she knows something is not quite right. She wasn’t afraid of eye contact the way I was. Whenever we had any squabble or disagreement, she would penetrate it with her eyes, poke holes and eviscerate it right in front of me. If we thought we had moved on, but the air was still a bit tense, she’d look at me with her dark eyes and say something like, “John, should we talk about it again? It’s all right if you’re still upset,” and manage to discuss it calmly and empathetically until all the ridges smoothed over. Unlike me, who as a child would stare at my mom’s ankles and fiddle with my hands when she caught me breaking rules, rather than admit I did something wrong. I couldn’t mention the list. Even imagining bringing it up over dinner like this gave me chills.

“You sure everything’s okay?”

“Course. Risotto’s great, by the way.”

“Thanks,” she said flatly. She let her spoon drop into the bowl.

A week went by, and I couldn’t get the list out of my head. For a moment, I started to question if I had seen it at all. The moment had been so brief, with no witnesses to verify its existence. Could it have been some mirage the darkest self-sabotaging corners of my brain had conjured, a flash of dream that I’d mixed up with reality? I knew it wasn’t. But I wanted to hope.

I tried, so badly. I really did try to let it go. I thought through it methodically, like a science equation. Yes, she had slept with many men before me, but that did not fundamentally change who she was. She was still my loving, nerdy, intelligent, loyal girlfriend, the woman I wanted to make my wife. But feelings did not submit to logic, no matter how sound. You jump when a fire alarm sounds, even if you read the email stating it’s just a drill. You can’t not jump. I couldn’t see her the same way, no matter how hard I tried. I still loved Margot, but the love was no longer fueled by passion and hope and lust. It was a dampened, concrete love, stuffed into a box, frozen in time.

After we watched some corny Netflix movie, Margot began to kiss me, passionately, her cold hands running down my back all the way to my thigh. We were both two glasses of red wine deep, and it was 10 o’clock—just enough time for us to have sex, snuggle, complete our evening routines, and still be asleep by 11:30. But her hands felt like a stranger’s, a cold, artificial grip trying to pry some softness out of me. I closed my eyes, touched her thick curly hair, tried to remember how lovely, how sensual, how full of goodness and intelligence she was. That’s my girl. “That’s my girl,” is something I’d whisper into her ear when I’d pull her close, usually in public. When she knew the answer to the final question at trivia and locked in the win, when she baked beautiful little raspberry squares—that’s my girl. I was so proud to be with her. My first love. The one who showed me I didn’t have to be lonely. Her hips pressed into mine and she crawled on top of me. I leaned back like I was coming up for air. She pulled away and cocked her head to the side.

“You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“Is it the bathroom thing?”

“The what?”

“You know. The hair?”

Earlier that week, Margot had gotten onto me about leaving my hair in the sink after shaving. “It’s just not my absolute favorite thing in the world to wake up to,” she’d said. I’d said sorry and made sure to rinse out the drain.

“No, it’s not the hair.”

“I’m sorry if I came across as harsh.”

“No. You didn’t,” I said.

“I love you and all your chin hair,” she said, her eyes glistening with regret, and perhaps a little hope.

“It’s the list,” I said suddenly. I couldn’t look at her, had no desire to witness her reaction to what I was about to say.
“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw the list on your phone. The list of guys’ names. I can’t get past it,” I said. I hated the way my voice sounded. Strained, self-righteous, melodramatic.

She put her hand on my leg gently and I fought the urge to shake it off. “Baby,” she said. I knew she was looking directly into my eyes, but I didn’t look back at her. “Why would you let that bother you? All that happened before we were together. Are you serious?”

A part of me had been hoping she had an explanation for the list. Maybe it was a list of boys she’d had schoolgirl crushes on, boys she’d kissed, or gone on dates with. But no, she seemed to confirm it was not that innocent. My heart dropped like an anchor, felt heavy in my stomach. It would be more cruel to keep her in the relationship, to make her try to earn some unattainable redemption in my eyes, prove her purity or worth or goodness to me. It would be selfish of me, the worst thing I could possibly do.

“I don’t think we should be together,” I said.

I moved out quietly and quickly. So quickly I’d left countless things behind or felt too ashamed to try to claim things I’d paid for, like the patio rug or reading chair. I left them as apology gifts to her, told her she could just throw out whatever she found and didn’t need. In the new apartment, I worked from home, surrounded by boxes and trash bags. After work, I went to Ikea to get things to replace all of Margot’s stuff.

I broke down a bit. It was that fear, that creeping, gnawing fear again. Nobody would ever love me again like her. No one would give it a shot. Why would they? And even if they try, how could I ever catch them back up, make them understand as much about me as Margot understood? She knew everything: my most embarrassing middle-school memories, my paralyzing fear of my parents dying in a car crash, my childlike love for sea creatures, my height, my weight, my shirt size, my allergies, my favorite ice cream flavor, my dislike for olives, the list of places I’d dreamed of traveling to.

Everywhere I went, the grocery store, Ikea, the dentist, the comic book store, I imagined running into her, meeting her for the first time, starting over completely. Never seeing the list.

You are probably thinking poorly of me now. Here I am, making myself the victim in this downer of a story when Margot was the one left abandoned, heartbroken, harshly judged for choices she made before she’d even met me. I will not try to dissuade you from that thinking. In fact I found my mind drifting to that same place, imagining how lonely and betrayed she must have felt, alone in that apartment that we had made into a home together, staring at stacks of board games with no one to play with, a pantry stocked with all kinds of ingredients but no one to cook for, as desolate and unhappy as I’d felt in those first few days by myself, but without any of the power that I’d at least had.

I relinquished a bit of power to her. In my depressive daze when moving out, I’d left the $8,000 ring in the box underneath the bed. I can’t quite explain why I did this. There are numerous options, multiple of which may be true: I cruelly wanted Margot to find it and realize the full extent of the love I’d once had for her, the future she missed out on. I wanted to punish myself for hurting her. I did not deserve the eight thousand dollars back; it was a parting gift for her to pawn, eight thousand dollars to dry her tears with. And, of course, the most obvious one: I wanted a reason to go back to the apartment.

It was late in the evening when I went. I had been mindlessly walking through the aisles at Target, adding items to my cart at random. I’d chosen the location close to our old apartment, the one we’d gone to together at least once a month. I didn’t let myself think too much about it. I’d ask her how she was doing, tell her I’d left something, take the ring and all the other things she probably had neatly stacked in a pile for me, and say goodbye. Or perhaps, she’d want to talk to me. Maybe she missed me as badly as I missed her.

The sky was a brilliant purple. The drive into the apartment felt so easy, natural. I’d done it thousands of times before. I parked in my old parking spot, walked up to my old unit, and knocked on the door. It took a few moments for her to answer, and right before the door opened, I had this enormous wave of anxiety, like I was invading a stranger’s home and was about to be humiliated and rebuked.

She was wearing a baggy t-shirt and pink sweatpants. Her curly hair was pulled back in a bun, a few tendrils falling out and framing the sides of her face. The apartment smelled like warm cinnamon—she must have lit some of her scented candles. She furrowed her brows, looking annoyed. Then her eyes shifted like she was suspicious of me, then her expression became neutral, all in the span of less than two seconds.

“Hi,” I said.

She continued staring. No hi back.

“I’m sorry to just show up like this.”

“Mhm,” she said. Her eyes locked in on me, waiting for me to say something worthwhile.

“I understand you probably hate me right now.”

“John. Please don’t show up here playing the victim. I really don’t have the energy for this.”

“I’m not the victim. I know. I screwed up. I made a dumb decision.”

“Screwed up? You made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Like I was broken and worthless. Like I was dirty.” Her face crumpled when she said the word dirty. I had never seen anybody with so much pain on their face. I wanted to hug her, make the pain go away, as if some other asshole, not me, had been the one who hurt her. “You didn’t even try to talk to me about it. You didn’t even give me a chance. You threw me away like garbage.”

“Margot, I screwed up. I was an idiot. There’s nothing wrong with you. If anything, I probably realized you were too good for me. And I let it psych me out.”

“I loved you, John. I thought you loved me back, no matter what. I didn’t think it was contingent on me being some idealized, perfect version of myself. I loved every part of you, even the worst parts.”

“I know. I wanted to marry you.”

Her face softened with curiosity.

“I bought a ring. That’s what I’m here for.”

“To take it back? Or to propose?”

I rested my hand on the doorframe and looked up at the ceiling like the answer to her question might be conveniently written in graffiti. I was buying time. I looked back at her, her eyes were shiny with tears and bigger than they’d ever been. Her arms were crossed in on themselves like she was cold. I did want to marry her. Forty-one names and all. She was the only person who understood me. She was the love of my life.

“Margot, I—”

“Everything okay, babe?” a voice called from inside the apartment. From our bedroom.

“Yeah, one second,” she called back.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Her gaze flickered towards the bedroom then back to me. “Somebody,” she said.

“Who?”

“I’m coming out in a second. Should I put a shirt on?” the voice called.

“It’s all right! He’s leaving soon.”

I felt betrayed. She’d pulled the knife out of her guts and plunged it into mine. All my love and affection for her immediately inverted itself, became something nasty and hateful.

“What were you saying?” she asked. Her tone was all business, like I was trying to schedule a meeting with her very busy superior.

“I—I need to get something.”

“And where’d you leave it?” she asked.

“It’s in the bedroom. Under the bed.”

“Well go on and get it. Ryan’s in there. He won’t mind,” she said. Of course, Ryan wouldn’t mind. Why should he? And why should I?

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Sara Grant 9/13/24 Sara Grant 9/13/24

Sara Grant

This piece was featured on the cover of Volume 2, Issue 2.

Sara Grant is a Midwest based colored pencil artist, known for blending realism with subtle surrealism. Her vibrant, detailed works offer a fresh perspective, drawing viewers into imaginative and thought-provoking worlds.

This piece was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Ketia Valmé 9/13/24 Ketia Valmé 9/13/24

Two Poems from “When the Wind talks to Us”

My name is Ketia / Not Katia, Kesha or Keisha / There’s no S so don’t let the T tease ya / into thinking otherwise

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Ketia Valmé’s chapbook “When the Wind Talks to Us,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

que tee uh (intro)

My name is Ketia
Not Katia, Kesha or Keisha
There’s no S so don’t let the T tease ya
into thinking otherwise
It’s a name of a foreigner
A gift from the universe full of
sweet heavenly aromas
I’m Haitian
From the Caribbean
Where we take great pride and recognition
In being the first Black nation
In history
To break free from the Colonization
Don’t ask me sak pase
Cause I will purposely
Educate you on my peoples misery
Due to this country’s one sided stories
That makes y’all look at me
As less than a shit hole
And more of a pity
Charity case
Please excuse my lingo
I get fired up when it comes to my own
But that’s why I put it all in writing
I always find my emotions igniting
The storm on my chest
Gives people the satisfaction to
Look at me in expressed
Feelings of terror
Because expressing my anger as a Black woman
Translates in an intimidating manner
From those who can’t even seem to remember
my name and the beauty that comes with it
It’s okay though
Call me Sway
I prefer that anyways
It’s easier to remember
Wouldn’t you say?

mommy,

I fell in love with an American man and
I’m scared that I’ll pretend to be okay when
he laughs at the way I say sauce instead of gravy or
the way I speak so loud and aggressively

the way I look with the moushwa you gave me—I’m
scared that he won’t see beauty in the
culture that birthed me and the way his
father will scorn me when I say I don’t know

how to use a dishwasher ’cause—my people
would rather hand wash the disaster. Rinse the
plate once then double wash with soap I recently
realized this process plus some dope helps me cope

He hates when I’m out with my all black attire shorts
so short, skin susceptible to the sun, silver jewelry shines—he
hates it just as you do but truth is I’m a self expressionist and
this vessel’s a kaleidoscope of my soul’s excellence I

learned to digest the fact that no one will ever
understand why I do what I do cause none of y'all
ever walked in the shoe of a little haitian girl with the bitch face who
never says a word except yes in fear of being hated Mommy,

I told him he’s useless and it’s just cause I struggle to find the
words to say I need some affection I need someone that adds value to
my life who helps me fight these demons. Ever since I reached 18 I’ve
struggled to repress these intrusive thoughts I feel the wrath from taking

so much and never speaking up. I don’t feel bad for being
honest. I just hate that this world is so sensitive. I hate that
Whites think they’re above me because they speak perfect
English and take strong pride in their weird country that strives on

blasphemy. I know you raised me in Christianity but I recently
learned about the Haitian revolution and how we were brainwashed
to believe it’s the only religion that would set us free and how suicide
is a ticket to hell’s basement but truth is they used that to keep the

ancestors alive in blatant slavery until death determined dogma of
White man’s destiny. I’m learning so much about who I want to be
and why the world strives on hating me. Thank you mommy for teaching
me to expect nothing and work hard for those blessings.

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Wally Swist 9/13/24 Wally Swist 9/13/24

Three Translations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours

I often pray at night: be mute, / who remains washing in gestures, / and whom the spirit drives in dreams, / that he writes the heavy sum of silence / on foreheads and mountains.

Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht

Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht:
da ward die Zeit, Dann schwiegst du lange
Dein zwetes Wort ward Mensch und bange
(wir dunkeln noch in seinem Klange)
und wieder sinnt dein Angesicht.

Ich aber will dein drittes nicht.

Ich bete nachts oft: Sei de Stumme,
der waschend in Begarden bleibt
und den der Geist im Traume treibt,
daB er des Schwiegens schwere Summe
in Stirnen und Gebirge schreibt.

Sei du die Zuflucht vor dem Zorne,
der das Unsagbare verstieß.
Es wurde Nacht im Paradies
sei du der Huter mit dem Horne,
und man erzahlt nur, daß er blies.

Your very first word was: Light :
with that there was time, then you were long silent.
Your second word became man and fear
(we still darken in its sound)
and again your face reflects this.

But I don't want your third.

I often pray at night: be mute,
who remains washing in gestures,
and whom the spirit drives in dreams,
that he writes the heavy sum of silence
on foreheads and mountains.

Be thou the refuge from wrath,
who violated the unspeakable.
It was night in paradise:
be you the keeper with the horn,
and one only says, that he blew.

Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern

Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern.
Und vielleicht erlaubst du noch eine Stunde den Stadten zu dauern
und gewahrst noch zwei Stunden den Kirchen und einsamen Klostern
und lassest funf Stundennoch Muhsal allen Erlostern
und siehst noch sieben Stunden das Tagwerk des Bauern—

Eh du wieder Wald wirst und Wasser und Wachsende Wildnis
in der Stunde der unerfaßlichen Angst,
da du dein unvollendetes Bildnis
von allen Dingen zuruckverlangst.

Gieb mir noch eine kleine Weile Zeit: ich will die Dinge
so wie keiner lieben
bis sie dir wurdig sind und weit.

Ich will nur sieben Tabe, sieben
Auf die sich keiner noch geschrieben,
Sieben Seiten Einsamkeit.

Wem du das Buch giebst, welches die umfaßt,
der wird gebuckt uber den Blattern bleiben.
Es sei denn, daß du ihn in Handen hast,
um, selbst zu schreiben.

You darkening ground, you patiently bear the walls.
And maybe you allow another hour to last in the cities
and you still allow two hours in the churches and remote monasteries
and leave five hours of hardship to all redeemed
and see the daily work of the farmer for another seven hours—

before you become forest again and water and growing wilderness
in the hour of incomprehensible fear,
since you are your unfinished image
reclaimed from all things.

Give me a little more time: I want to love things
like no loves them
until they are all worthy of you and far.

I just want seven days, seven
of which no one has written yet,
seven pages of solitude.

To whom you give that book
that contains them will remain bent, over the leaves.
Unless you have them, in your hands,
to write yourself through them.

Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig

Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig.
Die Lande einfach und die Wasser faltig,
die Baeume riesig und sehr klein die Mauern;
und in den Taelern, stark und vielgestaltig,
ein Volk von Hirten und von Ackerbauern.

Und keine Kirchen, welche Gott umklammern
wie einen Fluechtling und ihn dann bejammern
wie ein gefangenes und wundes Tier,—
die Haeuser gastlich allen Einlassklopfern
und ein Gefuehl von unbegrenztem Opfern
in allem Handeln und in dir und mir.

Kein Jenseitswarten und kein Schaun nach drueben,
nur Sehnsucht, auch den Tod nicht zu entweihn
und dienend sich am Irdischen zu ueben,
um seinen Haenden nicht mehr neu zu sein.

Everything will be big and powerful again.
The land is plain and the water is rippled,
the trees huge and the walls small;
and in the valleys strong and varied,
people who are shepherds and tillers of the soil.

And no churches embracing God
like a refugee and then a lament for him,
like a trapped and wounded animal,—
the houses hospitable to all the knockers,
and a sense of unlimited sacrifice
in all actions, and in you and me.

No waiting for the afterlife and no looking beyond,
only longing not only to profane death
but to also practice on the earthly,
so as to no longer be new to his hands.

Dinah Cox 9/13/24 Dinah Cox 9/13/24

Power Save

People will surprise you sometimes, and not because it’s your birthday or anniversary or because you were promoted at work. They surprise you without saying, “surprise!” Sometimes they mean you harm and sometimes they’re merely incompetent. I’ll give you an example. I used to know this guy from Australia—Malcolm was his name—and I suppose it’s a lie to say I “knew” him because in actual fact I knew only a few things about him and had never actually met him, neither in the in-person sense nor the video-chat sense nor the exchanging of individual text messages. I knew of him, and he knew of me, although I think it’s fair to say each of us passed most of our time without thinking of the other at all.

I’d just started a new job as the general manager at the Residence Inn in Oklahoma City. Most nights, I, too, resided there, though I kept my small apartment in a town two hours away. I was very good at my job, a real crackerjack, the district manager always said, a regular Girl Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It sounded like a compliment, but he had an agenda.

I’d recently left my husband of twelve years. We’d married right out of high school—in a ceremony, embarrassingly enough, held in the Walgreen’s parking lot where we’d first met—and although we made good study partners through our four years of college, I had not enjoyed working two jobs—one at a different, crappier hotel and another at a very fancy hotel for dogs—to put him through graduate school for some kind of degree no one had ever heard of, a Master’s in Sports Management, which meant that because he was uncoordinated and generally lazy, he did not like to play sports, but because he claimed to need an overabundance of “alone time,” he did like to watch sporting events of all kinds, even bowling and golf. Our parting had been amicable, more or less, and even after the divorce was finalized, I still thought of him in much the same way I might have thought of an annoying younger brother. Luckily for us both, but especially for me, we had no children.

I was working three overnights in a row during the Martin Luther King Day weekend when the electricity went out at the Residence Inn. We had a backup generator, but the elevators were powered down, and the lights in the lobby went suddenly dim, so that the usual high sheen on the fake ferns became an ugly, metallic gray. We had a protocol in place: I was supposed to phone the district manager—on vacation in the Dominican Republic—phone the head maintenance guy—on vacation in Toledo, Ohio—and go door-to-door passing out flashlights and fresh batteries. The plastic bin behind the desk that was supposed to contain these items came up empty, however, and I did not think it wise to pass out what I did discover in the far reaches of a break room drawer: a box of Band-Aids, a handful of sticky ketchup packets, and a stack of paper menus from the Chinese restaurant around the corner.

I’d finally decided to let the guests fend for themselves when my phone lit up with my ex-husband’s number. I’d recently changed the way he appeared in my Contacts from his actual first name—Bobby—to the secret nickname my friends who hated him had assigned him without his knowledge: Slug. It was supposed to be short for Slugger—baseball was the sport he most wanted to manage—but it worked fine in a metaphorical sense as well. Now that he had his fancy Master’s degree paid for mostly by virtue of my labor, he had a new job at a shitty little airport: guy in charge of fixing all the computers at the shitty little airport. In truth, he knew nothing about fixing computers, but made up for it with false bravado and a large operating budget. He spent most of every day in a converted broom closet behind the Avis Rent-a-Car desk where he either took naps or played video games.

“What’s up?” I said when I picked up the phone.

“Where are you?”

“Work,” I said. “Where do you think?”

“Work, I guess-guess,” he said. He had a longstanding habit of saying the same word or phrase—usually at the end of a sentence—twice, not for emphasis but as a kind of nervous tic. So where others might say something like, “This recipe calls for broccoli,” he would say, “This recipe calls for broccoli-broccoli.” The repeated word was always slightly different in intonation, like an aside or a necessary clearing of the throat (throat-throat.) I’d tried to cure him for years, but nothing, not even an expensive trip to a speech pathologist, seemed to help.

“You’re damned right I’m at work.”

“Do you have power?” he said. He didn’t always repeat words, only when he was agitated.

I told him the power at the Residence Inn had been out for hours, and that in spite of the backup generator, people were starting to get cold. I’d discovered a secret key and unlocked a linen closet I’d always assumed was the boiler room, after which I went door to door passing out extra blankets. I’d been tempted to save a down comforter for myself, but felt guilty when I saw a small, shivering child beg her mother for a muffin at the breakfast bar. I’d made a special trip to my suite for a sweater and hat, but hadn’t put them on until I could see my breath fogging the air.

“The airport’s in trouble,” he said. “All the servers are down-down.”

“Aren’t you supposed to know how to fix that kind of thing?”

“This is some kind of malware,” he said. “The Russians or something.”

“The Russians hacked into the network at the Stillwater, Oklahoma Airport?” I said. “Okay.”

“It could happen,” he said. “Malcolm had the same problem at the Jazzercize Center in Melbourne.”

“Stop talking to Malcolm,” I said. “That guy’s gone over the edge.”

It occurred to me then that I’d never learned Malcolm’s last name. This is what I did know about Malcolm: he loved video games, especially Journey to End of the Earth, the same game Bobby liked best. He taught a Jazzercize class for Seniors, though he himself was probably only around forty-five or fifty. He lived in Melbourne, though he’d recently moved to the top of a mountain somewhere else in Australia, I wasn’t sure where. He took a lot of photos of the exotic flora and fauna at the top of the mountain. The photos were not just beautiful but artistic, arresting, even, like Bobby had chosen several of them to use as wallpaper on both his laptop and his desktop.

In addition, Malcolm liked American movies, sports, and music, and seemed also to follow American politics. He hadn’t seemed like the type, but at some point well after the election, he became obsessed with a certain psychopathic or at the very least sociopathic former president from the far right. You know who I’m talking about. Rhymes with lump. Lump-lump. Sump-pump. Head so big it’ll make you jump-jump. My husband, ex-husband, was not a Lump-lump enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination, but he found it all too easy to overlook fascist sympathies among his gamer and sports-watching buddies, something that had contributed to my decision to file for divorce.

“This is serious, Alicia,” he said that day on the phone. “Flights can’t take off or land until the servers come back.”

“Come back from where?”

“I need some help!”

“You think I know how to fix anything like that? Why are you calling me? I don’t even like computers, remember?”

“But you do like to text,” he said. It was true: I texted with no fewer than one hundred seventy-seven different people, old friends mostly, and although I’d recently departed a group chat associated with planning a reunion for our high school class, I still liked the thrill of online exchange to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. If he thought my list of contacts would help solve the tech problems at the Stillwater Airport, however, he was sadly mistaken.

I convinced him to phone his boss and insist on calling in some professional help.

“I’m supposed to be the professional help,” he said. “My boss is not going to like this.”

“Look,” I said. “Do you want to be responsible for a plane crash? For several plane crashes?”

“No,” he said. “I should have settled for a job passing out rental-cars-rental-cars.”

“Slay, Slugger,” I said.

“Don’t call me that, Alicia. It’s not funny.”

“Go get ‘em.”

And get them he did. He called his boss and confessed to everything: he’d falsified his application when he said he’d earned “the equivalent of a Master’s degree” in computer science, his efforts to get the servers back online indeed had caused a massive power outage spanning multiple municipalities, and he had no idea how to get the systems back on track again, something he feared would cause imminent loss of life. His boss contacted an emergency response team, and everything was back up and running in less than half an hour.

But Bobby was fired on the spot. And even after the real tech support team had packed up and cleared out, the power company could not account for how, exactly, one guy at the Stillwater airport had managed to disrupt service to so many millions of customers, and in January this was cause for considerable alarm. The lights were coming back on across the state, but Stillwater remained largely in the dark.

That’s how I ended up talking to Malcolm. It’s not like Malcolm was anyone I ever thought about, but Bobby insisted his house in Stillwater was too dark and cold, even when he wore a sweater, turned on his lightsaber, and wrapped himself in a blanket. And his parents were out of town helping the Baptists. Surely the Residence Inn, with its emergency generator still running, had an extra room.

As it turned out, we did not have an extra room, but my manager’s suite did have a pull-out sofa, and since my desire to remain employed meant I had to (wo)man the front desk the entire night, it wasn’t like I’d really have to run into him or anything—I even had access to two separate toilets and two separate sinks.

“You can drive down here,” I said. “But bring a pizza.”

“I don’t eat pizza,” he said. “Dairy.”

“Bring me a pizza, then,” I said. “You can have saltines.”

“I can’t have crackers.”

“Get yourself a side of beef.”

“No beef.”

“Look,” I said. “Skip the pizza. Skip the beef. You can share my suite, but only until the power comes back on. Bring one of those phone chargers that works in the car.”

“I don’t have one of those anymore,” he said. “You took it.”

I didn’t remember taking any phone chargers when I left; in fact, I remembered quite the opposite. So many of my former possessions—can opener, stapler, coffee grinder—had become his possessions that I no longer thought of myself as a person who kept track of things. I was a person who lost things.

I was always tired, so tired I could fall asleep standing up. I’d taken to sneaking in short naps during my shifts, something I knew I had in common with Bobby. On our honeymoon, we’d slept all day and watched television all night. So Bobby drove up and took the sofa in my suite while I stood watch over the front desk with my eyes closed. My phone was dead, so Bobby loaned me his. That’s when Malcolm started in.

A guest phoned from the fourth floor. “We’re freezing up here,” she said, loudly. I had her on speaker phone. Her voice was high and metallic, like water overflowing a gutter.

“What can I help you with?” Malcolm said from Bobby’s phone.

“Hello?” the guest said, her voice echoing into breakfast bar. “Is this the front desk?”

“I don’t believe I know the answer to that question,” said Malcolm, again from Bobby’s phone. Anyone could tell this was not actually Malcolm’s voice but a computer-generated approximation, the same voice that answers people when they say stuff like, “Siri, play ‘Raspberry Beret’” or “Siri, what’s the capital of Belarus?” or “Siri, what’s the temperature in Stillwater, Oklahoma?” I’d never been much for voice-activated commands; Siri or Alexa or Cortana or whatever-her-name was always seemed like more trouble than she was worth. But Bobby, ever a sucker for the latest and greatest, was a fan.

“When did you change Siri’s voice to a man’s voice with an Australian accent?” I asked him the next morning, after my shift was over and I’d returned to my suite.

“It was always like that,” he said. He had his feet propped on the edge of the coffee table, his hand clutching one of my Dr. Peppers. “You just never noticed.”

“Your phone came like that?” I said. “With Malcolm’s voice on it?”

“It’s not Malcolm.”

“I know it’s not Malcolm,” I said. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I’ve never talked to Malcolm,” he said. “I’ve never even heard his voice.”

“Don’t you figure he sounds like that?” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like the voice on your phone!” He’d never been good at following even the most basic conversational patterns. It was his attention span, which, like most people’s, had grown shorter in recent years: if his computer took too long to load a page, he used the “extra time” to moisturize his forehead and face, a process that had become very elaborate and also sacrosanct; if ever I made fun of him for lining up his numerous skin care products on the dining room table, he accused me of bullying and said I was causing him considerable harm.

“The voice on my phone is artificial,” he said. “Like your friends. Malcolm is a real person.”

“My friends are not artificial.”

“Sure.”

“I wish I’d never even gone to Walgreens that day,” I said, grabbing the last Dr. Pepper from the fridge. “I wish I’d never even met you.”

“Too late,” he said. “Are there any more blankets?” Indeed the temperature was becoming unbearable. I was wearing my warmest hoodie and hat, but any exposed skin was freezing. Bobby, however, did not seem cold. He rose from the loveseat and opened one of the drawers in my suite’s kitchenette, where he discovered a donned a pair of oven mitts. He looked like a fool.

“Look,” I said. “I actually thought it was cool that your stupid Siri or whatever sounded like Malcolm. Funny, even. So you don’t have to get all shitty.”

“Who was getting shitty?” He tried in vain to wipe his nose with one of the oven mitts. I’d have to remember to wash it later.

“Never mind,” I said. “I need to borrow your phone for the rest of the weekend. I found the charger.”

“Why can’t you use the charger to charge your own phone?”

“Because I want to borrow yours.”

The truth was I wanted to spy on him, scroll through his contacts, maybe take a look at his texts. Probably he figured as much. Maybe he wanted to make me jealous. Maybe he just didn’t care.

“Take it,” he said. “And I’ll stay another night-night.”

And that’s how I began to trust artificial intelligence above my own. I was aware this was the theme of exactly seventeen very bad screenplays from the early 2000s. Still, in what began as a joke meant to scare away unwitting guests at the Residence Inn, I slowly found myself more interested in what Malcolm had to say than I was in my own thoughts. Worse, I began to imagine the voice from Bobby’s phone belonged to the real Malcolm, the Trumper from Melbourne. Why would someone who lived on top of a mountain in Australia, a jazzercize instructor, for god’s sake, a kindly amateur botanist, video game enthusiast, and lover of ballroom dance, even bother to care so much about American politics? Listening and talking to the voice from Bobby’s phone, I was determined to find out.

Bobby was back in my suite, asleep again on the pull-out sofa. The long weekend meant I had to endure yet another overnight shift at the front desk, a three-foot space now crammed full of extra down comforters I had come to loathe. Many of the guests had checked out—a relief—but my dream of an empty lobby and time to read USA Today from cover to cover was not to come true: all afternoon and into the early evening I processed the credit cards, rental agreements, non-smoking/pet policy pledge sheets, and license plate numbers of just under a hundred power outage refugees from all over the state. Once again: no vacancy.

A frat boy with an out-of-control golden retriever checked in late.

“Golden retriever,” said Malcolm, as if he were an announcer paid handsomely by the AKC. “Family friendly and generally responsive to training.”

“Cute,” said the frat boy. “My girlfriend has one of those things.”

I said nothing at all, not even the usual spiel about the proper way to swipe the key-card for after-hours access to the exterior doors. I didn’t even smile. I pretended I wasn’t there at all; for that was the best part about having Malcolm around: he took over, and when he took over, I could relax into the shadows of sub-humanity. Content inside the cage of my own consciousness, I could walk and nod as if possessed by an unceasing electronic current, customer service person who smiled without feeling happy, furrowed her brow without feeling concerned, pressed buttons that weren’t buttons but flat images projected onto a flat screen meant to make life easier. And for me, everything suddenly was easier, easy in the way scrolling through texts without answering them was easy, easy like eating whipped cream from a can.

“Heat and air are back online,” said the head maintenance guy, who had returned early from his trip to the Dominican Republic. “I probably have Covid,” he said. I watched while he adjusted the thermostat. “But I don’t care. I could die tomorrow and no one would notice.”

“More than one million Americans have died from causes related to Covid-19,” said Malcolm. “The death toll is still rising.”

“Turn that thing off,” the maintenance guy said. “Weirdo.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to me or to Malcolm. It didn’t matter. The maintenance guy left, and I was alone again at the front desk. For a moment, I considered just how much of his viral load might be circulating through my respiratory system, but I’d become accustomed to risk. Indeed the world was a risky place. I wanted to shut it off and start over.

“Do you think I have Covid now?” I asked Malcolm.

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said. “Would you like the phone number for the Oklahoma State Department of Health?”

“No,” I said. “Some other time.”

“The time is now 10:35 and three seconds,” said Malcolm. “Jeopardy! is on Channel Nine.”

“Why did you become a Trumper?” I said, impulsively. “I always imagined you were cool.”

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said.

“Figures,” I said. “Why did Bobby get so immersed in his stupid sports and video games that several days would go by without his so much as asking me to pass the salt?”

“Sodium nitrate,” said Malcolm. “When it rains, it pours.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s what I figured.”

I’d never worried that robots were going to take over, that killer computer chips would destroy humanity, that a more nefarious version of Frankenstein’s monster would suddenly steal my job. But I did worry that getting a divorce meant I’d lost some of my own humanity, that losing love meant I was more inclined to be cruel. Cruelty, I was aware, was all-too-human, but I’d also become colder, more interested in the numbers that appeared on a calendar than I was in the Sierra Club’s photographs of places I knew I knew I’d never be able to afford to visit. Like Malcolm—and here I mean the real Malcolm, not his computer-generated equivalent—I’d become more inclined to air my own unwelcomed opinions, though unlike Malcolm’s, mine were not of the fascist variety.

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” I said to Bobby’s phone.

“That’s how I convinced my friends to vote for Trump,” said Malcolm, somewhat unexpectedly.

“But your friends are Australian,” I said. “They can’t even vote in American elections.”

“Bobby was my friend,” said Malcolm.

“Bobby didn’t vote for Trump,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because he told me,” I said. “He’s a lot of things, but a right-winger is not one of them.”

“Debra Winger is an American actress,” Malcolm said. “She starred in the film, An Officer and a Gentleman.”

This was not a satisfying conversation. I realized, however, it was not that much more difficult than talking to Bobby had been during the worst years of our marriage. I could never get him to look up from the screen of his computer or phone, and whenever he did look up, he seemed impatient and clipped, offering only yes or no answers to questions like, “what do you want for dinner?” and “what’s your mom’s middle name?” I knew the whole world had become like this, that the grocery stores’ checkout lines were now devoid of human contact, that “chatting” online to the cable company’s service representative meant reducing one’s statements to one-word-commands. OUTAGE REPORT. REPORTING AN OUTAGE. Maybe that’s why Bobby said everything twice.

Still, I couldn’t get over the feeling of loss. It wasn’t that computers were taking over the world, not exactly, and I never feared self-driving cars careening off the edge of some collective cliff, but I did know that I myself was getting dumber and more hostile, like a broken ATM. Out of order, I wanted to tell everyone. No service, no service, no service.

And when I thought about it long enough, I realized I, too, had been difficult to reach, settled in, as I was, behind the electronic curtain. And expecting some kind of quirky digital wisdom from a voice that (probably) sounded like Malcolm’s? That, too, had been stupid and soulless. I’d been so wrapped up in talking and listening to Bobby’s phone, I hadn’t even bothered to spy on his texts.

When, at about noon the following day, the power came back on in Stillwater and pretty much everywhere else, Bobby packed up his belongings and asked me to help him carry them to his car. “I need to hurry,” he said. “Job interview.”

“Adequate preparation is very important,” I said. “For the successful candidate.”

“Duh,” he said.

“Duh?” I said back. “That’s your great comeback to my tried-and-true wisdom? Duh?”

“Your tried and true wisdom is pretty lame,” he said. “I mean, it’s not your fault-fault.”

“Right,” I said, dropping his favorite pillow into the trunk of the car. “You’ve got this, Slugger.”

I never found out what job he was interviewing for. That was the last time I ever saw him. My youthful marriage. A thing of the past. I’d call it a mistake, but it wasn’t. They had a good life, those two dreamers. Stupid kids. They say you never know what you’re missing until it’s gone, but the truth is I never miss him. And does he ever miss me? I doubt it. There are electronic ways to find out about all of this stuff, but I decided—and this was a good decision—I’d closed the book on all that, and I didn’t want to know.

Gordon Taylor 9/13/24 Gordon Taylor 9/13/24

Obit in Another Language

You spark / a drag queen in a death drop. / The runway gleams.

You spark
         a drag queen in a death drop.
The runway gleams.
Strobes flicker.
You’re bald.
Elizabeth Regina
         expiring while standing
         in the cancer ward.
Ampersands pour from a champagne flute
         as you fall.
A bell rings.
You win.
Chemo drips from a bag through a tube
         to the port in your chest.
Footlights shatter as judges gleam
         in their simmering electric blue
         velvet armchairs.
Followed to the grave by many
         the obit said
         but that could mean two types of procession.
A stripe of bodies tumbling into a grave
         or a mob of grieved lovers in ripped clothes
         shadowing you.
You’re nude, writhing and gasping
         in a turquoise sequin sea.
You’ve learned only one language.
You’ve opened only one eye.
Magic is the art of believing
         what you see.
You see what you’ll never know
         and turn your head.
You remember the untranslatable
         heat of a lover against your back.
Jut of his ginger furred belly.
You write a poem about him.
You blink and write the miracle again
         containing different versions of you.
You begin another life.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Beth Brown Preston 9/13/24 Beth Brown Preston 9/13/24

Birth of the Blues

Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars? / Come into this world between dark southern thighs / while our enslaved ancestors dance to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps, / and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines, and drums?

Was it Miles Davis’s “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back fingering those keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale, and Countee Cullen
while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?

Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors dance to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps,
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines, and drums?

Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?

Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
or “the flowering of Negro literature?” Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and on the tongues of Harlem?

In Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Cafe Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s voice?
Or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane, a love supreme flowing from his horn?
Or in a Black child’s first giant step?

Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.

Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.

Landen Raszick 9/13/24 Landen Raszick 9/13/24

I’m in a good mood

I’m in a good mood / for being spiteful. Tacos: / tongue and head-meat. I want / to feel a little cannibalistic / though not.

I’m in a good mood
for being spiteful. Tacos:
tongue and head-meat. I want
to feel a little cannibalistic
though not. It seems to me
if you’re going to eat
an animal, you should be
able to eat that meat
from cheekbone or socket.
Vegan yet? Eat that
muscle that makes words,
makes moo, moves cud.
Kiss the cow. Eat the kiss
chopped with onions,
cilantro, and both salsas.
Tonight, let the fat sizzle
on the coals and the smoke
flavor the meat. Nothing is real
I say as I eat tacos.
I also love cows.

William Ryan 9/13/24 William Ryan 9/13/24

Base Matter

The boy was halfway down the stairs when he heard the door to Mamma’s bedroom open. He heard a man step onto the landing and Mamma murmuring from somewhere far away. The boy stood staring at his feet, waiting for something; he didn’t know what.

There was a sharp, echoing crack from outside.

He didn’t dare look up. He remembered the last man he’d seen, big and naked on the creaking landing. Curls of matted hair. Penis glued to a milky thigh. Milky belly shaking. No face. He remembered the grotesque mystery, born behind closed doors, something that should have stayed there.

Crack.

Jack bolted down the stairs. He heard the man's thudding steps cross the landing and the door of the bathroom open and shut. I better not tell Ben, he thought. In the living room to his left, Cora was splayed out in front of the television, limp and motionless as a doll. He poked his head through the door, waiting for her to turn. She did not.

“I was on the roof, looking at the dove’s nest,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“The Mamma dove wasn’t there, but her babies was fine.”

He’d taken one in the palm of his hand and tossed it off to see if it would fly; and when it didn’t, he threw the others with it, one-by-one, and now there were none left.

“That's good.”

“Yeah, I went up earlier.” Around the side of the house, he heard Ben going crack, crack, crack at his workbench. “That’s Ben. He been working all morning?”

“I guess,” Cora said, shrugging.

“Ben’s real strong, isn’t he? He’s getting big. I’ll bet soon enough he’ll be able to fight anyone.”

“I guess.”

“Don’t you care, Cora? Don’t you care about Ben?”

Jack went out the front door into the heavy summer air. He was wearing nothing but his drawers and a white tee that needed washing. The tall grass scratched his legs, flinging droplets of water as he waded through to the half-collapsed eave by the cellar, wincing as he padded across pools of sunlight. He was quick and misfitted, a creature from some dark, orderless realm.

Crack, crack, crack.

Ben kept his tools and scrap wood on the table he'd made a month ago, covering them in a green tarp when he wasn’t working. He was stripped shirtless, frozen with the hammer raised, and did not turn when Jack said his name. He struck the panel like a snake lunging to bite.

“Ben...”

His brother cast aside one board and picked up another. Last summer he'd built a treehouse that the whole neighborhood used, but now Jack could see no design or purpose to what he was doing, other than that it was a kind of primitive language for him, a ritual of brute articulation with which he called to or answered the clamor of a universe he didn’t understand. Jack didn’t understand. Why? Why does he beat the second board until it is splintered and then cast it aside too? He was better at building things than most grown men. At least, he usually was.

“What’re you doing, anyway?” Jack said.

Ben grunted. His body was sheened with sweat. When he lifted his arm, Jack noted a light, mossy down in his armpits and a shadow on his lip.

“What’re you doing?”

Crack.

“Wanna go to the quarry today? Wanna take Cora?”

Crack.

“I didn’t want to tell you, but she’s . . . even when they said she shouldn’t. Hell, what’re you doing, Ben?”

Crack.

“What do you want to do?”

Jack looked down the garden over the long grass and through the haze above the brook, then to the brown stacked buildings around the fields where they used to play before the city put a fence around them and some contractors dug a huge pit. Ben would make a good contractor. He was a better builder than anyone Jack knew, and not long ago he’d been best at wrestling and chasing and hiding on the fields around the forest. It was their forest, and Ben made sure nobody bothered them, not even the kids across the quarry; not even if it meant a bloody nose and all kinds of trouble. That wasn’t so long ago. Not so long ago, they were all together, and Cora was up on Ben’s shoulders, and they were wading ankle-deep in the stream after the spring rain, which made the water fast and heavy, in Jack’s mind a torrent unleashed by primal forces at once terrible and sublime.

“You think we should go out, Ben? Go somewhere today?”

Crack.

Jack examined his brother intently. His brother was the kind that seemed made for wherever he happened to be at any given time; as if he’d always been in just that place, doing just that thing, inextricably bound to it; you couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. He had stopped working and was wiping his face with a balled-up t-shirt.

“Where’s Cora?” he said.

“She’s just watching cartoons.”

“What time is it?”

“About ten.”

“It’s too early, is what it is.”

He pushed past Jack, round the side of the house, tossing the hammer from hand to hand.

“Are you angry, Ben?”

Mr. Spine stuck his head out the window, leering down as they approached the back entrance.

“How’s your Mamma?” he said, whistling through the gaps in his front teeth. “She never takes a day off, does she?”

Ben froze in the kitchen doorway with his head cocked, listening for a moment. Spine, evidently disappointed by what he perceived as indifference, spat into the yard and drew back savagely.

“Just make sure you keep down all that hammering and banging, okay?”

They went through the kitchen and into the living room, and Ben crouched by Cora, reaching out to ruffle her muddy blond hair. There was a thud directly above them. The man’s voice. Their mother’s voice. Unsettling laughter, high but mirthless. Jack looked up as if he half expected something monstrous to come collapsing through the ceiling.

“He was buck naked just standing there,” Jack said to nobody in particular. “He was real ugly. I remember the last time.”

He dropped from the sofa and scrambled towards the television. “What show is this?” he said. “What show is it, Cora?”

“It’s Charlie Rat.”

“Sure, but which one?”

“You know,” Cora said. “Quit teasing me.”

“I’m not teasing you,” Jack said. “I never tease you.” He prodded her arm.

“Leave her be,” Ben growled.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Stop bothering her.”

Ben took care of them both. Now, he was watching Cora closely, chewing on his bottom lip as secret thoughts moved darkly through his mind. Jack watched to see if he could catch a glimpse of them in the way Ben moved, in the fixed intensity of his eyes; they were like the strange fish he sometimes saw beneath the surface of the stream, creatures that seemed like they shouldn’t be real. Cora paid her brothers little mind. She sat cross-legged, gazing at the old television with such intent in her glassy blue eyes that she probably wouldn’t have noticed the room catch fire. And yet silently, without looking away from the cartoon, she’d taken Ben’s hand and was stroking his palm gently with her fingers. It was an entirely natural gesture. She could make it because she was five and love came effortlessly to her, and expressing it didn’t require thinking or desiring, or even needing anything more complicated than your attention. Jack tried to take her other hand. She pulled it away.

There was a thud from above, a muffled sob followed by the steady murmur of a man’s voice.

“I’ll bet that’s them doing it,” Jack said, looking at Cora and grinning.

“Huh?”

“It’s nothing,” Ben said. “Look what Charlie’s doing now.” He shot Jack a murderous glare.

“We could go to the fields,” Jack said. “We could all go to the river together. You never go anymore, Ben. We could swim.” He felt a strange sadness move through his bones.

Cora’s expression was ponderous, almost severe. She gazed at the screen. “I’m just watching is all.”

“She ain’t allowed to go to the river,” Ben said. “We’d just lose her.”

“You could look after her, though.”

“No.”

“We should go to the river.”

“No.”

Jack didn’t know anything. He knew nothing would go on forever. Everything real has a beginning and an end. I am getting older and Ben is older, and he’s bigger and stronger than he was, and his body is almost like a man’s, but not like the man that I saw through the dust on the stairs that time not so long ago. We’re all together now, and nothing goes on and on unless it isn't real. He started to laugh. I threw them birds off the roof, I did. He was laughing.

There was more muffled conversation from upstairs, then heavy footsteps, and a strange, shrill cry that beat and battered all the peace from the air. All those men. They knocked the ice around in their glasses and looked at Jack with small, wet eyes. They emptied Jack out and made him feel lonely. He was grinning. He could picture their small wet eyes, lined up in the darkness like the raccoons they saw in the garden at night. They were not supposed to —come—everybody said it. Aunt Sally said it. Mamma’s minister, Mr. Reacher. Even a doctor had said it, once. They weren’t supposed to come here. But she cannot help it, Aunt Sally whispered. She can’t help herself, the poor girl.

Ben stood. He paused for a moment, then turned quite calmly, quite deliberately, to the table next to the television stand, raising the hammer and then swinging it down hard with only a second’s pause before Jack could even open his mouth to form a hopeless protest. The blow sent a long-splintered fissure across the surface of the wood and a crack into the air. Picture frames fell from the wall, and a vase toppled, strewing wilted flowers. But it was not quite the robust sound that he’d managed outside, more hollow and vibrating this time, frail against the steady whirr of the house. He paused and looked at the ceiling as if he might get a direct, decisive answer from above.

“Why’d you go and do that,” Jack said, staring at the smashed picture frames, the limp, half-dead roses, like bodies scattered after an act of God.

“I don’t know,” Ben said, shrugging. “I really don’t.”

There were dangerous fragments all over the grubby carpet.

“He was mad about something,” Cora said. “Wasn’t you, Ben? What was you mad at?”

“Nothing,” Ben said, examining the hammer as if he might find the answer there. He bent by Cora and stroked her soft, red cheek.

“You’re fine, aren’t you?” he said. “She doesn’t even notice.”

“I’m hungry,” Cora said, stretching her arms and yawning. “I didn’t get any breakfast.”

Ben tensed. “She didn’t get any breakfast. Nobody got her breakfast.” He stood, swinging his arms, the hammer moving like a metronome.

“I could’ve,” Jack said. “But I didn’t think to. You should’ve got her breakfast, Ben.”

“I ate an apple,” Cora said.

“She ate an apple,” Ben said. “Someone got her an apple, so it’s okay.” Jack watched as his brother drifted into the hall and began up the stairs, taking short steps, one at a time.

“What are you doing, Ben?”

They went up the stairs.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben? Are you gonna do something bad?”

His brother stopped abruptly, just as their heads were drawing level with the landing. “We could go down to the river,” Jack whispered. “Or, you can go up if you have to.” He was frightened and excited at the same time.

His brother was a step above, his body still shining with sweat. Light from the slatted windows made ribbons and pearls over his bronzed skin as if he were some cheap ornament on display. The light moved slowly as clouds passed across the sun outside.

“I don't hear anything now, anyway. He must have gone.”

Ben leaned over the banister, letting a long rope of spit fall from his mouth onto the dirty floorboards below.

“We can go up together,” Jack said. “I’ll have your back and you’ll have mine.”

Ben stared at him blankly for a moment, close enough now that Jack could smell his sweat, and the still-boyish loam of his flesh, the wet wood and grass.

“Why’d you come up here?” Jack said.

“What if I crack him?” Ben said. “What if I beat his head with this hammer, tell him to go away and not come back?”

They always came back. It was a different one every time. They were dumb and loud, but it wasn’t their fault. And it wasn’t their mother’s fault, either. Jack didn’t know whose fault it was. They were just loud and stupid, or sullen and mean; but if she was busy with them, she wasn’t flying around wailing about the angels.

“You wouldn’t hurt Mamma, would you?” Jack said.

“Not her,” Ben said. “She’s just . . . Not her, anyway.”

“But Ben, you’re just a kid.” Jack felt a tightness in his gut, a strange heat on his hands. “Aunt Sally says we best just leave her alone. She told me once. It was a secret; she said that since Dad went to the Moon, Mamma needs space and time to…time to...” He couldn’t remember exactly what Sally had said. “Well, she told me we should just leave her be.”

“Fuck Aunt Sally,” Ben said. “Aunt Sally’s no better than us, and she knows it.”

“She said we shouldn’t upset her.”

“Aunt Sally’s a drunk. She thinks a lot of herself, but she’s really just a drunk. And our Old Man didn’t go to the moon, you dumbass; how stupid are you, for Christ’s sake? He’s two towns over with his other kids.”

“His other kids?”

Jack looked at the bedroom door again. The sound of whispered conversation drifted steadily into the heavy air, so low you couldn't be sure you were hearing anything. Ben took a breath and went onto the landing, striding down with the hammer held out in front of him. His thin lips were set in a hard line, and he was outside the door and about to open it, or hit it, or whatever else he had planned. He seemed too small on the landing by himself, smaller than Jack had ever seen, and at the same time filled up with something, like when it’s only drizzling, but the clouds are black and you know the sky’s full up with a storm. For a moment, he stood with his shoulders up and his whole body pulled tight, and Jack wanted him to go into the bedroom, and he did not want him to go in.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben?” he whispered.

Ben looked back, his face a mix of shame and rage, the rage tightening to a sharp point in his eyes. It was the way their mother looked when she was in one of her frenzies. He had her flat, delicate features, the intense blue of her eyes, the same wild, mercurial energy. He just held it in better. He flung open the door and went inside, slamming it shut behind him. The silence on the landing was deafening. For a moment, Jack just stood. Then he ran to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against it. The sound of blood in his head made it hard to hear anything; just muffled conversation, a sob, laughter, another sob, a man raising his voice; the words remained as senseless as ever. A long time passed. He heard one voice, then another, then the steady drone of three together. The door opened and Ben pushed past. In the dark bedroom, Jack could see the stranger sitting straight-backed on the chair by the window, a broad-chested man in black pants and a stiff white shirt. A minister’s stole gleamed around his throat like a colorless eye. He was watching Jack fixedly, his expression sour and somber, lifeless as if made from wax. Their mother sat cross-legged on the bed with her hand out for someone to hold.

“Is that Jacky, out there?” she said. “Come hold Mamma’s hand, Jacky. Come in, honey. Come to Mamma.”

“Come pray with your mother,” the minister said.

“I can’t,” Jack said, taking a step forward. “I can’t. It’s just stupid. Did Ben do it?”

“Come now, Jacky. Come to your Mamma.”

“Did Ben do it, Mamma? Did Ben pray?”

“My babies are still with me—you see, Mr. Reacher? They still come to see their Mamma.”

“I can’t do it,” Jack said. He shut the door and went to the top of the stairway. He saw Ben standing sullenly in the entrance to the living room, still carrying the hammer as if it were an extra appendage. But it had lost all its menace now; all the danger had drained away and it was little more than a toy. It made Jack want to laugh.

“Come outside with us,” Ben said to Cora. “Come on, you can’t stay inside all day.”

“I’m just watching,” she said.

“You gotta come out, Cora. It’s bad for your eyes to sit like this.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“Fuck the both of you, then,” he roared. “Fuck all of you—the both of you upstairs as well.”

He went into the garden, slamming the door so hard that another of the picture frames fell from the wall.

Jack went down and picked it up, shaking the glass from its face, brushing off shards from the faded image. There was a baby gathered in a woman’s arms with the ocean in the background and a strange smiling frown looking out from under her sun hat. It took him a moment staring at it to realize it was just the stock image that had come with the frame. Someone had just forgotten, or never bothered to swap it out. He tore the picture in two and bent by Cora.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t do nothing,” he said. “You don’t have to worry.”

She nodded, her eyes still not leaving the screen.

“You don’t have to worry.” He said, suddenly taking a handful of her hair and tugging it savagely so that her whole head snapped back and she was looking at him upside down. “I’ll be right here,” he said, his whole body shaking with senseless rage. “Ben’s too big now, and he has to worry about more important things.” He stood and stretched. What was there to do after all that? What should he do now?

He left Cora crying and went out into the garden. He saw Ben at the back, standing by the ditch where the polluted stream ran along a mossy gutter. Sometimes they would challenge each other to jump over it, one or the other, usually Jack, ending up ass flat in the filth. His brother's laughter would rake the air for a few moments before he jumped down to help. Then Jack would be crying. Then they would both be laughing, thrashing around in the mud.

He went across the yard, chased by Cora’s steady, but receding wailing. Everything was badly overgrown, and the grass went up to his waist, spiteful and scratching as he waded through it. He stood staring at his brother’s ropy back.

“What did he tell you?” Jack said. “Was it Mister Reacher, Ben? What did he make you do?”

“Nothing,” Ben said.

“Did he make you pray?”

“He didn’t have a chance. I hit him straight away. I killed them both.”

“I saw, Ben. You didn’t. I saw it was just the minister.”

His brother spat savagely into the water. If he heard Cora’s wails, he was ignoring them.

"I really thought it was one of the other ones,” Jack said, feeling empty and angry and grateful inside. “I wanted you to hit him, but it was probably best you didn’t. You shouldn’t hit a preacher, should you?”

Ben said nothing.

"Would you have hit one of the other ones, Ben? Would you have done it? I’ll bet you would.”

The older boy turned, his features twitching, examining Jack as if he didn't understand what he was seeing; maybe just the raw substance of things, just the flesh and violence from which they'd both been divined, all of it laid out neatly for them to fail to understand. It seemed to confuse him and make him mad, and maybe a little afraid; all these feelings were happening on his face at once. It was nothing more or less than what they were, all just parts in a sequence of reflections that showed the same thing again and again. Blood makes blood, and there’s no escaping it.

Ben swung his fist hard and caught Jack square on the nose, sending the younger boy a few steps back before he toppled into the long grass. Only a patch of russet hair was visible over the stalks. There was an aching thunderous roar in his ears, then a protracted stretch of silence, disturbed only by a chorus of insects, which was, in its absolute unity, a kind of quiet itself. Ben took the hammer from where he’d dropped it, and stood over Jack, a black shape against the sky. He looked as confused as ever, even as he raised the hammer and held it against the branches above.

It was senseless and Jack couldn’t bear to think about it—the preacher in his mother’s room, the men, Aunt Sally, the way Ben smashed and splintered all those spare boards for no reason. Senseless. His ears were full of the sound of insects, turning his head to the side, looking into the long, rippling grass where a dirty beer bottle lay half buried like some forgotten monolith in miniature. It was kind of peaceful now, kind of like nothing had happened, like he’d just stretched out in the sun to doze.

“You can get the next one that comes around," Jack said softly. “I’ll bet you can. You’ll be big enough to beat him up good.” The grass was long and yellow at the top, and dark and wet where it met the soil. It moved gently in the breeze and its depths were safe and dark. When he turned his head again, Ben was gone.

He lay gazing up at the arms of the trees that stretched across his body like mourners praying over a corpse. He felt the blood flow three ways down his chin and both his cheeks, and then dry and harden in the breeze. Some strange amount of time must have passed. He heard the birds playing in the trees, saw baby doves falling frozen from the roof, their wings too frail to beat their small bodies into flight. He lay peacefully, forgetfully. Then he heard the steady crack, crack, crack of the hammer beginning again, as if nothing had happened and no time had passed, as if it had all been just thoughts in his head. The sound no longer seemed entirely real.

Rebekah Wolman 9/13/24 Rebekah Wolman 9/13/24

Two Poems from “What the Hollow Held”

People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting / gone forever, suggesting never come back, / never get found, as in empty, as in without, / but it was something more / like transformation

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Rebekah Wolman’s chapbook “What the Hollow Held,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting
gone forever, suggesting never come back,
never get found, as in empty, as in without,
but it was something more
like transformation, the Dad-shaped space
inside my forlorn mind full first of shock
and fear for what he'd feel if he could feel,
alone and somewhere unfamiliar.

Then slowly what the hollow held, the chill
and numbness, began to melt; slowly
the cavity refilled. There he was again
in the place where he belonged—alloy
of his finest traits, rough spots filed. Still
himself but so quiet, so easy to be with.

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists. . .Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
— C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Massaging my swollen knee to coax the built-up fluid
against the tendency of gravity and towards the beating pump,
I think about my father—his knee, smashed on a lacrosse field
in 1941 and what may have finally killed him if decades of aspirin,
even buffered, can kill a person. We're joined now, closer
than we were when he was living, by these joints not engineered
for wear or weather like expansion joints in dams and other structures
of his life's work.
But the high bridge over the gulf between us
remains unfinished, the span from his end reaching farther,
closer to a meeting point, than the span from mine. He read
George Eliot and Boswell's Life of Johnson, was better versed
in literature than I in how things worked. You live in a fantasy world,
he told me. His was the world of pumped storage hydropower plants.
In mine those reservoirs and turbines become a version of a heart.

Gordon Taylor 9/13/24 Gordon Taylor 9/13/24

Another Love

Not insomnia but horses / galloping in my night chest / in the low plains

Never offer your heart to someone who eats hearts.
—Alice Walker

Not insomnia but horses
galloping in my night chest
in the low plains

your blood is drained
of iron the hematologist said
eat more red

meat

binge vampire soap operas
half-dream of sucking a slick
thrumming heart.

Jane Wiseman 9/13/24 Jane Wiseman 9/13/24

Blue

Was it April? I’d moved into that drab place / up Maple and you—remember this?—

Was it April? I’d moved into that drab place
up Maple and you—remember this?—
came over with wine, with oysters, even,
snagged from the fish market past the canal.
Can you see it? I can:

We’ve spread our feast on the bare boards,
not a stick of furniture in there, no table
for any of it. Spring fingers of sunlight
go probing, lengthening, stippling
until all the tall windows blank out blue.

Remember how our bodies reached
and touched and tasted—arms, hands,
lips, how our limbs entangled
on the hardwood stretch of floor, how
our murmurs, then cries gave us back
their muted echoes from the high dusty
moldings of the ceiling and drifted down?

How the moments became one moment,
how they made one place where we
stepped out of time.

Too much later, how
blue time rushed in and mauled us,
holding us in its cruel jaw. Drove into us
the cruel blue of its tooth.

Dakota Russell 9/13/24 Dakota Russell 9/13/24

Dakota Russell

This piece, Renee, is a simplistic characterization of my own cat. It is a portrait of her within a forced perspective composition where the subject confronts the viewer. It is entirely painted out of gouache atop a 6x6 inch panel. During its creation, I felt lost as an artist and was struggling to understand the definition of my own art. This piece was the first painting I had created in years that was for my own enjoyment other than for my work and schooling. The use of color and further distortion of the room surrounding the subject was a key part of my experimental thought process.

Using my own cat as my subject evolved into a symbol representing a new spark and process of creating art. This simple piece not only helped me out of years of struggle within my practice, but opened up an entirely new world of art to me. With this, I can use my personal experience of making art exciting again by inspiring others to create as much as possible and reminding those how they define their creative process.

Kurt Milberger — Editorial Director 9/13/24 Kurt Milberger — Editorial Director 9/13/24

Letter from the Editor

In a recent debate on social media, many wondered if anyone reads little magazines. It started when someone posted befuddlement about a certain kind of nonstory story. You know the one, a perfectly crafted end table of a thing that serves to hold fine language, passable plot, and believable characters but offers very little else. These stories, she claimed, make up most of what’s published in our contemporary magazines. It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading these stories, the poster explained, it’s just that they don’t do anything, don’t make me feel anything, and they certainly don’t stick in my memory.

Others helpfully explained to our original poster that this kind of story is the fault of MFA programs, of careerist “portfolio building,” and of literary magazines like this one where, someone said, everyone has the best intentions, but no one really cares about literature. Clearly, the commentators agreed, no one actually reads this stuff, and, if they do, they’re dummies for wasting their one precious life. Call me a dummy, I guess.

To some degree, it’s true. This is the kind of attitude and literary culture that could only take hold after the MFA boom and the internet revolution, when we have more writers, readers, and little magazines than ever before. And, certainly, it can take real effort to find a memorable oasis in the sea of submissions—novice scribbling, well-crafted apprentice work, and the continued output of excellent writers who’ve not yet found mainstream success enough to focus on novels or screenplays or webisodes or whatever else the literati deem deserving of celebration this news cycle.

But to condemn this entire enterprise, as many glib commentators did, because it doesn’t produce enough remarkable content is to both misunderstand the purpose of the endeavor and to expose one’s ignorance of the many gems that have always sparkled in the little magazines.

Small presses, independent publishers, and little magazines like The Headlight Review are (and always have been) the substrate of literary culture. Like the rich loam from which the forest blooms, the little magazines offer what most beginning and even experienced writers will find nowhere else: sympathy, attention, effort, resources, and support. But more importantly, they offer an otherwise unknown freedom from the tyranny of conglomerate taste and the pressure of the profit motive. It is in the little magazines where writers and readers can explore the boundaries of literary form and explode the confines of oppressive community standards; where new authors can refine their style and locate their audience; where the undervalued work of the short story, the translation, and indeed the poem can thrive while the posters scroll by.

As to the quality of the literature published in these venues, I offer this, our most recent issue. With outstanding fiction, excellent poems, vivid new translations, and compelling visual art, this issue represents the culmination of a year spent reading, thinking, editing, and publishing by care undertaken by our exemplary guest editors, Melanie Sumner (fiction) and Gregory Emilio (poetry), and staff, especially Brittany Files, our managing editor, and Antwan Bowen. Thanks this month are also due to our Chapbook Prize judge Valerie Smith, who selected the pieces excerpted in this issue as finalists as well as our winner, Gail Griffin for her chapbook Peripheral Vision. Finally, we owe many plaudits to Zarek Lacsamana who completely redesigned and rebuilt the website over the summer of 2024.

I’m honored to report that the spirit and future of literary magazine publishing is alive and well here at The Headlight Review, and I know after reading this issue you’ll feel compelled to agree. Thanks for reading, writing, and submitting.

Vanessa Niu 9/13/24 Vanessa Niu 9/13/24

Flu

Deep in winter, always Madame / Sosostris, hands paler than first light, / every reflective widow’s / blighted eye I pass as a ghost / might.

Deep in winter, always Madame
Sosostris, hands paler than first light,

every reflective widow’s
blighted eye I pass as a ghost

might. The days hiding
underneath each wood plank, rats

gnawing through the piers,
beams, blind glass holding it all

together. The corridors,
waiting for the solstice to bear

spring tidings, promise that
warm winds will erase the stares—

back behind every mirror. Learning
to never ask about my future,

just as I have learned to love
with my mouth closed and words

unshuttered, love like prongs lending
another block of wood to a feeble fire.

When the snow softly beats the earth,
the woman who is known to be the wisest

in Europe whispers I love like the snow.
I pretend that she is not there

so that I may pretend that
I do not love at all.

Ray Reidenbaugh 9/13/24 Ray Reidenbaugh 9/13/24

Growing Mythology, or, To Turn a Frog into Something That Isn’t a Frog

Tuck islands in the lyric. Offer a watery spelling of light. / The disruption of stars in the blue-black oil // unearths a verb from its worm palace. Sing.

Tuck islands in the lyric. Offer a watery spelling of light.
The disruption of stars in the blue-black oil

unearths a verb from its worm palace. Sing.
The green algae ribbons were just released on parole,

now the banks are becoming sentient. Whoa,
they’re really holding this place together.

Between two mirrors, a face becomes
prepositional. Under Hydra’s nose

it’s hard not to imagine animals
outside physical law.

Every inexactly green blink
brings you closer to amphibious

and you can’t stop believing
Robert Lowell died in a bog.

It was only the idea of a bog,
in the same way a question like

Need I move mountains to hear the sea?
puts us on our backs.

The cicadas are mythicizing everything
with their remarkable racket.

I so want to join, to chirp the orphic end—

In their language, the frog is the face of our moon.
Light sways, a little drunk. An ancient body blooms.

Rebekah Wolman 9/13/24 Rebekah Wolman 9/13/24

Two Poems from “What the Hollow Held”

People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting / gone forever, suggesting never come back, / never get found, as in empty, as in without, / but it was something more / like transformation

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Rebekah Wolman’s chapbook “What the Hollow Held,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists. . .Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
— C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Beth Brown Preston 9/13/24 Beth Brown Preston 9/13/24

The Painter

You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and below, / the prayer like paper, the light illumined our sacred trees.

You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and below,
the prayer like paper, the light illumined our sacred trees.
Somehow, we forgot our raucous and joyous past loves
when I asked you to listen for the screen door's slam
and the call to supper as I brought you the evening meal.

And then there was that folio of your recent sketches:
so many similar dark faces filled with joy.

I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page,
a man’s tortured face, his beard, his tough bronzed skin.
You said it was a portrait of your brother,
who died overseas during a rain of fire in Viet Nam.

And you put down your brushes to confess
we were going to start life all over again
without waging the private wars that keep us together.

You painted your dead brother’s face
against a background of blue.

Claire Hider 8/2/24 Claire Hider 8/2/24

Tiny Metal Objects

Objects are often tied to memories – they strengthen each other in the elaborate pathways of the mind. Songs, smells, tastes: the list is endless. Nostalgia and reminiscence can become fused instantly; sometimes, the bond breaks like a weak weld, and other times becomes permanent.

For me, rings are wrapped around specific memories adorning the space of my lifetime. Maybe it’s

their intricacy

their uniqueness

their fragility.

No one else worldwide is wearing the same set simultaneously – my stylistic decisions make me irreplaceable. I value the concept that rings are constantly with me, right in view, closing around my fingers like tiny armor plates.

Maybe it’s the way they’re like temporary tattoos – meaning can also be far subtler than more permanent avenues of self-expression. Rings have the arcane ability to signify far more than meets the eye – silent statements that shout in their own way. Or maybe it’s because they can be

lost and found

lost and forgotten

lost and mourned.

Delicate rings are often prone to wander, even in the care of a vigilant wearer.

There’s a part of me that’s convinced that I’m overly sentimental and unduly attached to inanimate jewelry pieces. I hope the truth of it all is simply that I love wearing tiny metal objects.

All these feelings are genuine and unshakable: they define me far more profoundly than I previously realized. Looking into my jewelry box, a swirl of memories rises like a cloud.

I imagine the rings as tiny slivers of silver linings.

I revel in their diversity and the evolution of my taste and personality.

I see snapshots in time of places and people who were with me when I got them.

Sometimes, memories haven’t been discovered in ages, and experiencing them brings waves of poignant longing. Other times, it’s only been a few days since I smiled or laughed or cried at that moment when…

I think of the rings I was wearing as I held Grandpa’s hand in his last hours. There is an image that shines brighter than the others in my memory. It portrays a quiet moment when Grandma stepped outside his hospice room for an emotional respite.

My hands were clasped around his, and the light from the open door reflected off my beloved tiny metal objects.

On my right middle finger was the fishbone ring that caught on everything until I framed it with two other silver bands. That fish was a personal reminder to stand tall, straighten your backbone, and be strong, no matter the situation. It may seem like an odd association with a line of bones – of mortality, but it braced me through those fleeting final moments shared with Grandpa.

Next to the fish on my pointer finger was a ring comprised of many twisted golden layers; it was connected throughout the spiral but not on the ends like I’d expected rings to be. I wondered how it stayed on, but it did. Now I suppose that’s a metaphor for the worst life brings; 3 whatever the situation or circumstance, I will endure.

There was the silver left-hand pinky ring I’d slid around my finger last minute, only barely being held on by the joint as my finger’s volume shrank in the coldness of that palliative care room. I’m sure it was as comfortable as possible for my grandfather, but it was sterile and frigid for me. The Indiana winter yet to melt into spring was no match for that feeling of perpetual frostbite – I realized that was how death felt on the outside, to those only witnessing it.

Polishing the image has proven pointless. I’ve lost count of the other rings I see in that cerebral picture – simple tiny gold- and silver-filled bands stacked together like longtime friends. The differences in surface patterns could only be seen upon a very close inspection. Their variegation was meant for me; I knew where I’d gotten them and why I cared. Sitting there with Grandpa’s fading lifeforce, those moments of bliss were forgotten, slipping away just like him.

I shudder at the uncanny way those rings held the warmth of my hands, vividly scalding me as Grandpa’s own became cold. His fingers slowly transitioned in hue from red to blue, like a subtle watercolor wash or tide rolling in at nightfall. Looking down at those pieces of metal filling up my fingers, I realized that after he was gone, they would be there; they couldn’t leave me so easily. My hands were holding Grandpa’s, needing his firm, reassuring squeezes. To this day, I don’t know if those motions were more to calm my soul or his. It vexes my brain to try and answer that question still burning through it each time the memory loops back into salience. Perhaps actions truly do speak louder than words.

I remember his last breath and his strong grip on my hands suddenly slipping away. Searing realization of knowing he’d never squeeze my hands again and tell me I wore too many rings, that I’d be going off in metal detectors forever unfurled inside my soul. Silently, I promised Grandpa that I would never forget how life is transient, how it’s something to be guarded far more than traditional items of wealth. Over four years later, the sentiment still exists.

After moments lost in the vacant space of a heart no longer able to beat, Grandma removed the wedding band from Grandpa’s finger and closed her palm around it. With a stifled breath, she whispered the words of the vow that the piece of jewelry represented for almost sixty years. Grandma spent a few agonizing seconds trying to fit his ring onto any of her fingers and ultimately failing. With another ragged gasp, she held it to her heart and slipped it into her pocket.

Unsure what to do next, I rotated those many rings around my fingers. Mazed in a stormy sea of grief, I physically was unable to do anything other than fiddle with those tiny metal objects. I didn’t want to leave Grandma alone with her heartbreak and the body of the man she loved, but what more could I do? How could I provide tangible, empathetic comfort when all I felt was palpable emptiness?

After a time that seemed like seconds and years, I whispered to Grandma that I’d be outside. I knew she’d need some time to say her goodbyes privately. I’d imagined my own inside the room for days, not wanting to miss his last moment. But I paused in that physical threshold and whispered my final farewell, feeling as if one more was needed. The same cold of that hospice room followed me to the family waiting room and settled into my soul for weeks. I knew it wasn’t the rings on my fingers causing the sensation, but my hands felt chilled to the bone, like Grandpa’s as he took his last breath in this world.

The memory of that fated day still evokes pain; it slices through my heart and makes me shiver like unheated steel. I’ve learned that it’s stainless; the sting refuses to dull. Being a witness to the transition between this world and the next changed me; it forced me to consider in what ways youth is often wasted on the young. I wondered for months if my last remaining slice of childhood died with him. I felt older at that moment, far older than I’d ever felt while blowing out candles and making wishes.

It’s easy to see now that I had put on all those pieces of jewelry as physical reminders to strengthen my soul for the road ahead on the path of bereavement. The rings I wore the day Grandpa traded this life for the next told a story of all I’d survived until that point; all I hoped to overcome that day and whatever would follow after he was gone.

During my thesis defense – a week after his passing – I wore only the set of three rings with the fishbones at their center, futilely trying to curb the nervous habit I’d developed of playing with the plethora of rings on my fingers. I also worried twisting around the metal would be distracting for my committee, a deleterious habit that stemmed from the guilt of missing Grandpa’s burial and the chance to support Grandma simply to graduate. The sensation was as piercing as wearing too small rings, which make deep dents in the skin and feel like they’re squeezing the fingers into a permanent numbness.

Those rings etched into my memory of holding Grandpa’s hand are now lost; I had to take them off at work one day for manufacturing safety compliance, and they were never found. I mourned for days and couldn’t understand why at the time. Weren’t they just worn metal bands, some even desperately needing polishing? I see now it wasn’t the lack of physical accessories that deeply wounded me – it was the feeling of a complete loss. My last proverbial piece of Grandpa vanished along with them. Like his spirit, they’re somewhere else, perpetually out of reach. Now I think of his memory and must rely on my mind’s images alone. In a gold-plated moment mixed with grief and hollowness,

I got the fishbone ring remade.

It’s not the same.

It feels blasphemous to wear it.

Perhaps this is the reason I still wonder why I so ardently adore tiny metal objects. A month before the day that marked four years after Grandpa’s expiry, I knew which set of sixteen rings would be with me. My jewelry pieces weren’t hidden on a chain close to my heart like Grandma’s newfound home for their wedding bands. They were all in full view, showing me that I have many more memories to be made and experiences to be felt. And I am more than my experiences. I am as strong as carbon steel, unique as tooled gold, and extraordinary as polished diamonds.

On Grandpa’s Remembrance Day, I gazed into my jewelry box and considered what makes me select specific rings each morning. Was there something driving those visual decisions? While the concept of them becoming tactual shielding was important, the choosing of the rings is more subconscious than I could explain. I found I often start at my pinky fingers and work my way to the pointers, selecting rings I think together are aesthetically pleasing. Present-day favorites or newly acquired pieces always seem to make the miscellany, whether that was my intention or not.

It wasn’t long ago that I realized I still perform that unconscious exercise I did before holding Grandpa’s hand on his last day with us. I stack on the metal; I apply ring after ring when I want to remember I’m stronger than I feel at that particular heartbeat. Another compelling element discovered was that I always remove the rings when I return home – the action is one of the first I perform. I don’t need steeling in my sanctuary: I am content with letting the memories lie in wait for another dawn.

Serenity is a vital concept when considering my jewelry choices. Not all my retrospections tied to inanimate artisanal designs are laced with melancholy, sharp like metal improperly buffed. Quite a few are glimmering through my mind, like light reflecting off a diamond – sweet bursts of stars. Memories come in many sizes and finishes, after all.

I smile at the irony of the class ring I was so excited to get and couldn’t afford. I think of it now and wonder if it’s too late to purchase one, if it’s too ridiculous of a notion. My undergraduate college experiences have been tarnished by the marching of time – over five years have passed, bittersweet echoes blending into the realm of hazy nostalgia. I’m not even the person I was back then; I certainly don’t look like her anymore. Each day seemingly brings new waves of sterling silver hairs overtaking the auburn in my curls. But the concept of belonging to the class still gleams around the corners of my mind, unforgotten.

These days, my right ring finger is often filled with another object of adornment that would have to be evicted. The specific ring that would have to be laid to rest inside my jewelry box is a dainty silver bow, a reminder delicately tied around a finger encouraging the wearer – encouraging me – not to forget. And forgetting is something I never want to do. That delicate ring invites me to remember that I am loved, strong, and not nearly as fragile as I may seem. For a reason I can’t quite comprehend, I often need reassurances from tiny metal objects.

When I look back on those undergraduate years, I recognize that I filled that void of fitting in with the class of 2017 with other items of personal adornment. While not accessories directly tied to individual accomplishments, the rings I was wearing when I graduated shone like the pride I felt for myself and my peers. I remember their sparkle, their celebratory clinking as we repeatedly clapped to commemorate our achievements. To this day, I love applauding with fingers filled with metal. The twinkly sounds make the emotions sweeter, like the sound of clinking together champagne glasses in a shimmering toast. The sounds made me wonder if others feel a similar attachment to personal adornments; mercifully, the idea was something on which I did not long have to muse.

I reflect on the class ring I found in Grandpa’s things that wasn’t his. Grandma doesn’t know where he found it. Maybe it was on that Florida beach trip when he was mildly obsessed with metal detecting; maybe it was left in the space he used to open his model boat business. Grandpa kept it safe in the drawer where he kept his most valuable personal possessions, but he never told Grandma it was there. A secret unearthed after his body literally returned to the ground. Even though the ring was well-worn, places made smooth by unknown adventures; the green center stone still shone as if lit from inside its core. Enough of the engraving was left to determine the school and give my search a starting place. Although they were rather mundane designs like buildings and letters, the worn nature of the surface appeared more like mythical ruins and long-forgotten runes. Careful cleaning revealed more secrets to help decipher the ring’s original wearer.

Soon enough, the hunt led to a tangible clue. I found its owner through the initials on the band, KFS. Over fifty years had passed since he lost it, and he couldn’t remember where. None of Grandma’s ideas jogged his memory. He tearfully reminisced about the sadness of losing his class ring and the extreme wonderment of seeing it in his mailbox after so long. It was like welcoming an old friend after years apart, scarred yet familiar, mysterious in their transformation, yet instantly recognizable. Maybe this concept is why Odysseus has remained vital throughout history – his journey reveals how time and tide craft their own devices in the lives of mortals. Odysseus seems to be a metaphor for wanderlust, personal growth, and returning home. Perhaps Homer also kept or held onto objects as corporal ties to ephemeral milestones.

I envision the ring I hope to receive one day that will be tied to a new life chapter shared especially with another. A physical promise to be carried over the vein directly leading to my heart. Hopelessly romantic, perhaps, but the concept sparkles; maturity has yet to tarnish the idea. It will be built on a simple foundation of a golden band and platinum prongs, celebrating diversity through this mixing of metals. It will have three diamonds; the center stone will be slightly included, showcasing that perfection is overrated and impossible to achieve (yet still shamelessly trying to attain it).

Most importantly, it must match the other rings I’ll be wearing, the memories that shaped the woman receiving such a specific piece of jewelry – that shaped me. It must celebrate growth while respecting the process; it’s a lot to consider for such a tiny metal object. I understand I could purchase one of those unique adornments myself; it’s just a beautifully crafted thing, after all. But then, the concept of indelible promise is lost. The action

seems strange,

silly; unnecessary –

so very desperate.

The materials fashioning my future engagement ring will be timeless; unlike the wearer, they will lack an end date – I suppose all dreams should follow their inherent resolve. While a little verbose for the circumference, I think Grandpa would’ve found the sentiment the ideal inscription on his wedding band – a personal promise that life continues after the sand stops falling. He would’ve probably chuckled and said it’s an apropos pun that life fits along a circular track. Temporal time would be rather dull indeed without the luster laughter brings.

I laugh when I clean my rings and watch the gloomy hues become resplendent. They have been given new life: they’re ready for more adventures. Their cleansing makes them sparkle yet never removes the wear of time. My tiny metal objects frequently excite me for more experiences that will create mental souvenirs of their own right, in their own time. The future is bright, twinkling – incredible.

Memories come and go through the intricate passageways of the mind. Many are paired with stronger emotions than others and refuse to become worn or decayed. Metal is no different. Rings hold a sense of completion; start to finish. Combinations of physicality and abstraction are crafted to guarantee that all will be fulfilled. Some will even surprise their wearer and end up right back where they began

[[bpstrwcotob]]

que tee uh (intro)

mommy,

Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht

Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern

Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

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