On “Belly to the Brutal”

Interview / Jennifer Givhan

Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: Jenn Givhan was kind enough to offer an account of her her wrenching and often heartbreaking fourth book of poems, Belly to the Brutal. During our interview, Givhan generously touched on ideas of motherhood (and how it changes time itself), generational and carried traumas, what it means to be haunted, and the process of writing as a means of spiritual survival

Your most recent collection, Belly to the Brutal, explores ideas of lineages of trauma and how trauma can be inherited. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to speak to this important topic within the collection and/or individual poems?

When I was a new mother time didn’t make sense. It stretched, it stuck. It grew ponderous. Heavy at times. Gauze thin at others. Motherhood is a time machine. Now that my children are teens, I feel the weight of their matter pulling me, stretching the fabric of spacetime toward their centers of gravity.

Rooted in my Mexica culture, my work explores cyclical existence, emphasizing the intricate relationship between women, children, nature, and the spirits that inhabit spaces between time and language.

All of these hidden or underbelly experiences speak of what travels through the cells, the inner workings, what’s in the DNA, what we pass on in the unspoken as well as stories.

My work delves into the unspoken, the omitted and forgotten, the buried and record-struck. I’ve long advised writers to say the damn thing—and I try never to shy away from the unsayable. Secrets in our house and my mother’s house and her mother’s before that meant a girlchild harmed and I’ll never abide by keeping things hidden that need to be bloodlet and the poison pulled out. I’ll never be shamed or harassed into silence. And yet—we can make omissions as writers for the haunting spaces they create in their wake—the sense that what once lived there has moved on—narrative, memory, or pain. Louise Glück says that “deliberate silence” is “analogous to the unseen… to the power of ruins… [which] inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied.” Something of their spirit is still intact in the work. The ruins of what might have been linger. Even that which stays buried can be redeemed.

All of this relates, for me and my poems, into what we carry through the DNA. Wounds through the womb.

Our genetic memory carries tales of trauma and triumph, passed down from our antepasados, connecting us in ways both tangible and intangible. Scientific revelations suggest we carry trauma in our genes, echoing our ancestors’ experiences. The language of our lineage can bind us to our past for better or worse, as Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldúa have expounded in their seminal works. For some, societal discrimination against ancestral languages has led to cultural disconnection and rootlessness.

The fact that we actually carry trauma in our DNA haunts me. It expands horrifically like an imaginative bomb in my brain… to think of all the world’s horrors within us, claiming us, and not letting us go, and that this is cellular, in the blood…

But there is a saving takeaway. As sociologist Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters argues: “The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, something against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.”

The key word here is transformation. When the ghosts of our past or our ancestors’ pasts come to us, in means that something needs to be done, something needs to change.

In our poems, as in our lives, we have the marvelous ability to transform reality, as well as to see the transformative reality that already exists (around and within us).

So while our genes carry our Ancestor’s trauma, we must also be echoes of their joys. I have started trying to capture this in Belly to the Brutal, but I sense the next journey of my poetic path is to keep capturing the joy onto the page.

In this collection, ideas of wounding, being wounded, and the wound are woven in almost every poem in this collection. These manifest both as physical, psychological, and spiritual injuries. Can you speak to how this theme developed?

As writers, perhaps more than average folks, we likely have a deep, abiding sense that in some way, we’re already all broken. Or, we’ve all been broken at some point. And that the narratives we’re writing and revising and recreating in our poems draw from that foundational fracture. As Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

In my poem drafts I tend to write the same beating heart over and over. Cheryl Strayed calls it the second heart and writes about getting down on the floor to pull this second heart from one’s chest onto the page. I think of “The Two Fridas” by Frida Kahlo, each with a heart, one broken.

Tony Hoagland calls the flood subject or foundational fracture one’s “mythical wound.”

Kim Addonizio writes in Ordinary Genius, “I had discovered the thing I wanted to keep close to me for the rest of my life, and if I did that, my tutelary spirit would watch over me, would teach me what I needed to know… This is your genius: your own profound desire to write.” Desire will only get us so far. It’s when we put our “ass to the chair,” she says, that our demons will show up. The demon, then, for some of us, is whatever holds us back from writing the thing we’re meant to write. That keeps us scrubbing floors both literal and metaphorical rather than sitting down at the keyboard and, as Hemingway famously said, bleeding.

Addonizio’s demons resonate with my own, which spew venom in my ears, even after publishing five full-length collections of poetry and two novels; my demons taunt: I’ve been writing the same damn poem over and over—I should be more political. No, wait, I should really be more personal. But somehow universal, and not narcissistic. I’ve been accused of confessing. I should be more esoteric. I’m lost. I’m floundering. I cannot scratch my way out. To hell with it, I give up.

Except, for me, giving up has too often meant more than never writing again.

So writing has been survival.

I must continue writing.

And what almost invariably comes is my deep mythic wound, in whatever form: Heartbreak that stems from my first love having a baby with another young woman—when I’d lost our baby to miscarriage.

No matter what else I write. The mythic wound often finds a way of needling itself through.

I’ve healed again and again. I write myself into healing again and again.

But the second heart that continually needs excising every time I begin a new project is this: I wanted to become a mother and couldn’t. And then I could.

After struggling for years with infertility, I adopted my son when I was twenty-three years old—this was seven years after the traumatic experiences at the Clinicas de Salud with my high school boyfriend.

In my life, I transformed my reality.

Later, I wrote a novel about a young woman who gives birth to a stillborn—and then comes to believe that a baby doll she names Jubilee is the daughter she lost. The story was inspired by Reborns, dolls that are created to look just like “real” babies, and that can be custom ordered to look just like children who have grown up or passed away; they are “reborn.” Reborns fall into the uncanny valley and are often described as “creepy,” though I see them as a beautiful transformation.

When I couldn’t have children, when my body wouldn’t cooperate, when the lines wouldn’t transform into a pink cross, or when the pink cross did appear but then the bright red poppies began their painful stain, I made myth. I became a mother in my poems and my babies were alive and the blood flowing out didn’t mean dead.

When I adopted my son and I had no idea what I was doing and felt like a body snatcher like a thief like an imposter and his colic-stressed body and his sleepless-helpless body kept us both in perpetual dreamstate and I was afraid always he’d wake some day and scream You’re not my real mother, instead, we created myth. We became mythical, to each other. In our mutual need. The myth of motherlove carried us; it carries us still, through thick reality, through thick reality we learn each day to love.

Whether I have a story or poem or spark in mind when I begin writing, every journeying onto the page begins for me as a plunging downward, into the heartgut or through it, and there I must begin digging.

I don’t know if the wound will ever heal. But I’ve created so many beautiful things from it that even if I die with this hole in my heart, it’s a hole that’s sprouted whole ecosystems that’ve fed those I’ve loved.

An overarching theme in The Account Magazine is the act of offering “an account”—of bearing witness, or carrying and offering testimony. How do you see the poems in Belly to the Brutal interrogating these ideas?

Most of my work deals with the monstrous in some way. Belly to the Brutal grapples with monstrous motherhood. Mothering through mental illness.

Sometimes the monsters don’t need our slaying, but our compassion—our empathy and understanding. Sometimes the monsters are not monsters but captive to the dark power wrecked upon them. Sometimes, they need us only to witness. To see them.

This newest collection was about extending that same compassion I give outward monsters to myself. Seeing the seeds of trauma grown into violence within me—and forgiving myself. But first, I had to bear witness.

And it was damn painful at times.

Of writing monsters, Karen Russel writes of having empathy for them: “Poor motherless thing. Look at it looking.”

I wanted to show how even mothered things can be accidentally mothered into violence that needs rooting out. How machismo culture, how the violences enacted upon girls and women… how that can all contribute to unintentionally passing those on as norms. And how one mother needs to be brave and self-aware enough to stand up and say, Basta. Enough. To stop those cycles of violence from repeating.

So the mother at the end of my collection births herself anew, as Frida Kahlo in her visceral painting, birthing her own damn self. And in my collection, the mother does it when she births her daughter and realizes that she has a chance to remother herself alongside her daughter.

In bearing witness to my children’s lives, I was able to witness, again, my own childhood and my mother’s struggle from a new lens that lent me empathy and grace I couldn’t feel when I was hurting within it.

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices.

Her newest poetry collection Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press) and novel River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing) both draw from her practice of brujería. Her latest novel was chosen for Amazon’s Book Club and as a National Together We Read Library Pick and was featured on CBS Mornings. It also won an International Latino Book Award in the Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category.

Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.

On “The Court of No Record”

Interview / Jenny Molberg

Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: Jenny Molberg’s The Court of No Record searingly draws inspiration from court proceedings and criminal investigations, showing how the criminal justice system ultimately fails women. During our interview, she offered wonderful insights into the creation of the collection, touching upon erasure—and how victims of crime are often called upon to erase themselves and their truth in persuit of justice, the banality of evil and silencing, and how poetry bears witness to the unsayable.

Your most recent collection, The Court of No Record, explores ideas of trauma and how trauma can inhabit and even erase one’s entire identity. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to speak to this important topic within the collection and/or individual poems?

In an essay I return to again and again, Solmaz Sharif’s “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure,” she writes, “After all, the proliferation of erasure as a poetic tactic in the United States is happening alongside a proliferation of our awareness of it as a state tactic. And it seems, many erasure projects today hold these things as unrelated. Still, when it comes to erasure, this very form of palimpsest, the ghost is not only death or the degradations of time—the ghost is the state itself.”

In the wake of intimate partner violence, with experiences of past trauma and sexual assault pressing their hands against my inner mirror, I found myself in court, several times, trying to articulate my Truth against what the court allowed me to speak of the truth. The whole story, the context of a situation, the big picture of the Truth, I’ve learned, is alarmingly irrelevant to the U.S. court system. It’s interesting that you use the word “erase” in this question, as I wrote many of these poems as an outcry, a reaction, and a defense of the self I knew, fighting against what a toxically masculine culture, and a “justice” system wanted me to erase of myself. In the midst of trauma, I often had the sense that I, as I had once known myself, was slipping away, buying into the gaslighting waged against me, until my own perception of reality became muddled, like I was looking at a familiar lake through thick fog.

After the events that were the impetus of this book (which, ironically, are dangerous to directly address in writing), I was left with nearly 400 pages of court transcript. I wanted to create, in Sharif’s words, a kind of palimpsest with that text, where I could write the truth over what happened to me—a complete and violent disregard of my truth, a state-supported silencing. In writing these poems, I had experienced enough self-erasure, so I wanted to insert, to footnote, to make additions to the text of trauma. I wanted to paint over the existing portrait of me, because it wasn’t the truth; in doing so, I felt that I was probably speaking towards the experience of many other survivors who are unsafe in telling their stories. I wanted to write in a kind of secondary language to anyone who had experienced intimate partner violence, abuse, and assault—to create a courtroom where we might be heard, an underground record of the actual truth.

Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil. Many of the poems in The Court of No Record explore this idea though their form and technique—particularly in the second section. Can you speak to how this evolved as you wrote the collection?

I think this question is a perfect segue from the first—in order to create a truthful courtroom setting, I had to play into the banality of its silencing, to use form and language that spotlighted its sometimes-absurd evasions of the truth, and to invent characters that embodied the relentless silencing of survivors. For example, when I wrote persona poems from the perspective of the abuser’s lawyer, I wrote mostly in misogynistic verses from the Old Testament, as this mirrored the experience of being shamed and humiliated for living in a female body and speaking out against abuse. When I wrote the second section’s “evidence” poems to capture the undocumented evidence of abuse or assault—the invisible proof of memory—I used Adelaide Crapsey’s cinquain form, a highly formal syllabic verse, to show that evidence of abuse can be proven in exact measurements, but is all too often dismissed.

The fact that I had to be careful about what I was saying—that I needed to, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “tell it slant” in order to protect myself and others—created a similar situation to writing in fixed form. That is, I needed to write from the margins of my own experience rather than in a Confessional mode—there were intrinsic formal constraints. I looked to the work of female forensic scientists, dream language, and metaphor (like the dogs in the book’s second section, or in “Bitch as Sheepdog”) to get to the heart of the violence and silencing I had experienced.

In terms of how the banality of evil evolves in the book, I was cognizant about the way the sections grew out and away from each other—the first addresses cultural obsession with violence against women, the second confronts the court system, becoming more personal, and then in the third, I adopt the “bitch persona,” a voice that allowed me to more openly rail against those damaging systems, letting a sense of humor and defiance into the voice. Writing poems like “Bitch Interrupts a Wedding” and “Bitch Under a Tree Eating Wendy’s,” I wanted to take back my own voice, inhabiting the sexist language that had been waged against me, to grapple with the fact that my own internalized toxic masculinity had led me to believe that speaking up for myself made me a “bitch”.

An overarching theme in The Account Magazine is the act of offering “an account”—of bearing witness, or carrying and offering testimony. How do you see the poems in The Court of No Record interrogating these ideas?

Lauren, thank you for these thoughtful questions and thank you and the entire staff at The Account Magazine for doing such important work—seeing poetry as testimony is integral to my own creative process, and so many of the poets I cherish and return to. With The Court of No Record, the idea of an “account” is central to the book’s existence. The great Björk comes to mind: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.” “Lying,” or bending facts to get at the emotional truth of a situation, was one of my earliest lessons in poetry, and one that I began to interrogate as I was writing this book. In writing these poems, I sought Truth-with-a-capital‑T, while simultaneously balancing the fact that speaking the Truth about my personal experiences with abuse was not safe for me. This leads, I think, to a question about the author-speaker divide—it’s difficult not to conflate the two—but that conflation can lead to a dangerous situation for the author, which I’ve unfortunately learned through firsthand experience. How can poetry tell the Truth while simultaneously keeping the poet safe? How can writing serve as testimony in a situation where witness is a dangerous act? As a longtime disciple of the poetry of witness, the work of such poets as Carolyn Forché, Paul Celan, Muriel Rukeyser, Czesław Miłosz, Yusef Komunyakaa, and so many others (I could go on and on), I repeat Forché’s words on resistance in the poetry of witness like a prayer: “If we have not, if we do not, what in the end, have we become? And if we do not, what, in the end, shall we be?”

Poetry, unlike other forms of writing, allows an embodiment of the unsayable on the page, through metaphor, negative space, elision, and other techniques. With these poems, I wanted to embody the silencing that often occurs, personally, culturally, and legally, when survivors speak their stories. I wanted to, as Forché writes, look beyond the personal and the political to “the social”: “a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated.” I hope that these poems contribute to an often-silenced dialogue about intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and emotional, psychological, and physical abuse—that they both serve as testimony and bear witness to a larger societal problem. Though the subject matter is dark, in the end, I hope that readers can feel hopeful—that to write into the canyon of silence is possible; that, when able, if we can speak against the pact of silence that so often accompanies abuse, we can create a barrier of safety; and that, in confronting and interrogating commodification of violence against female bodies, the power of toxic masculinity will be diminished.

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Having earned her MFA from American University and her PhD from the University of North Texas, she is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.

2 Poems

Poetry / Lisa Fay Coutley

:: Letter to Future Me While Rewatching Game of Thrones ::

All the small centers of the center
leak now. People dress themselves
in endings. Tell me you haven’t
washed the snow from my hair.
I’m still cross-legged in the angry
age of our little epoch, blaming
the girl who turned herself clock
to get us this far. I hope you will
still be foolish enough to forgive
who we love, & that I am finally
among them. Today is when I
gave us a name you’ll braid white
down either side of our future
face. I cannot stop craning to see.
I spend so much time with you now
I hardly touch me anymore. Pleasure
is the smell that refuses to cast its
inevitable goodnight. Big spoon me
in the street. Your palomino knows
someday I’ll pull in that gravel drive.
Already I’ve named the pines for sap
tacking animal hair from my hands
to yours. Every center, like I’ve said,
ignores its eye. Did you stop fighting
artifice? Have you let yourself best
friend your assigned AI? How lonely
are you there, scoffing at the nature
of my reductive inquiries. Of course
the woman who succeeds me shall
be smarter than I. So yeah. Anyway,
the one thing I know won’t change
is everyone—you included—wants
a woman who saunters out of a fire.

:: Letter to Future Me Regarding Our 11s ::

Your face will slacken someday. Even
if it’s that day. That day that comes

more in the mirror now
than in bed or under running 

water scalding as mother
said. Should’ve slept with your bra

on if you wanted a man. These days
sagging alone, I watch the whole

Game of Thrones just waiting
for that tragic moment Wylis

holds the door. I am, after all,
yours. Your braless daughter,

Sad Mom. Doesn’t that just burn
your jaws? I know. Shh. Future me—

are you listening to the temperature
of my voice? My barometric

pressure? Do you know how
many heavy rains I’ve needed you.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Over the years I’ve written letters I’ll never send, letters to my dead, letters to lovers, letters from an earthbound poet to an astronaut in space (and back), who were both, of course, parts of the speaker’s self needing distance to be seen/to see clearly, to try make sense of what it means to be alive. Always they’ve been letters of missing. Recently, the person I’ve been missing—who I was afraid I might never see—was me, specifically Future Me. If I wasn’t worried she wouldn’t arrive, I was waiting impatiently for her, as if moving through trauma and grief and an especially difficult year could have an end goal dressed in a better version of me waiting at the other side of the seemingly never-ending tunnel. The heavyhanded and all-too-familiar metaphor aside, I’ve been writing to her as a way to make a list, maybe, of what I might like to see in my future (or not), and then she wrote back. This work, I guess, is a flare sent into darkness, and I’m making room for it because even if I can’t see clearly just yet, still, I have to tend the desire to keep looking. This is how I know to look.

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, forthcoming 2024), tether (BlackLawrence Press, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is also the editor of the grief anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024). She is an NEA Fellow, Associate Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and Chapbook Series Editor at Black Lawrence Press.

2 Poems

Poetry / Denise Duhamel

:: POEM IN WHICH I NEVER STOPPED DRINKING ::

I’m dead by now—car crash or bad fall. Or I’m still here, but feeling dead inside, yelling at 
Target cashiers or maybe staying home, my Tower Vodka delivered by Total Wine. I have more 
cringy stories or stories swirling about me. I might have slept with a student by now or a dean 
who’s a drunk like me. I might have been fired, actually, claiming my dismissal was all someone 
else’s fault. I never developed the good habit of flossing daily or trying to get eight hours of 
sleep in a row. I might have drowned in a pool or the ocean or a bathtub. I might have pissed 
myself in public. I have surely forgotten the rent check, credit card payment, lost my voter ID. I 
might have stopped writing poems entirely, with excuses about why they are stupid. I might have 
stopped reading them too. Or there I was, until I wasn’t—a high-functioning, lampshade-wearing
jokester who tripped on a step and hit her head, who tore through that stop sign on her way 
home.

:: POEM IN WHICH I BEFRIEND ROYALTY ::

During quarantine
a lizard so green
she looked like a toy
latched onto the screen
door of my balcony—
she must have climbed a tree.
The sound of her scared me.
My blinds closed, I thought she
was someone trying to break in.
I peeked through the slats
ready to scream,
ready to dial 911.
The foot-long lizard
had climbed as far as my knee
and I shook her off, gently,
afraid she would rip the mesh.
I kept talking to her
the whole time. I was so lonely
that Florida winter, I almost
invited her inside.
She had matching lime green
eyes. When I googled her later
I learned she was a Cuban Knight.
Clearly she was able 
to fend for herself. Still I mashed
a banana and served it to her, 
al fresco, on my best earthenware.

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems are from a series in which all the titles contain the word “in which.” I began this series as a way to imagine other outcomes to my life or what might have been—a prose poem, for example, in which I never became sober and am possibly dead. But the “in which” was also expansive enough to bring me to glimpses elsewhere—private moments of shame or loneliness, imaginative leaps into the inner workings of my body. For me, it’s been a magical literary device, the “which” like a “witch” casting her spell. The work in this series has gone in surprising directions, the titles tethering me down. I find it increasingly liberating to state my premise in the title, to let the title do a lot of the work to ground a reader.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

2 Poems

Poetry / Joanne Godley

:: The Hardest Read ::

Inspired by The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and 
Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture, by Vincent Woodward,
 and after Catherine Pierce

In protest, I say the word delectable.
Woodward’s text-title has, for me,  
rancid-washed this word’s flavor. 
In protest, I repeat the word, delectable.
Craggy letter-bits stick in my craw.
Once a pleasing and delitable word,
for me, is delectable, no more.
I spit it out.  

In protest, I say the word, Negro,
and find me shadowed in a corner,
flirting with views past and upon me.
Years ago, at Thanksgiving, my brother asked, 
Why don’t they sell Negro turkeys?  
 No one in our family ate the white meat.

In protest, I say the word, voyeur.
I stare out the window onto the street
lush with jacarandas. My new country.
The purple canopied calles of my neighborhood,
are named for poets and statesmen.
Maimonides. Arquemides. Lamartine.
In protest, I say, I have done the thing.
This fucking thing. I crawled out
of the beast’s belly and slithered away. 
Breathing. Human. Black.
Gut juices painting my path.

My dreams creep back, 
enter my bedroom with caution, lest I relapse.
In protest, I reclaim the word ease.
I say the words copiousness and abundance,
in near disbelief. 
I nap, voraciously.
I am overdue for a leaching.
In protest, I say the word sinuousness.
I say the word luminescence.
I remember night-quiet, wintered Philadelphia,
ice-sliding Osage Avenue with R.,
translucent spears clinging to skeletal trees 
and telephone lines.

My grandfather steepled churches 
using wood gathered from the Great Dismal Swamp.
Watch me maroon, fellow maroons. Watch me prosody.
Watch me cacophony while incognito,
persnickety into clandestine.

I am the right brand of paranoid.
And with perfect tastebuds, no delectable for me.
Watch me polish the ‘I’ in thrive.

:: Gone ::

an Expatriate’s CV¹

________________________

                                                                 ¹I was born
I was born  I burst                                bookish     into poetry & charismatic color
nearly blacklisted			      but hallelujahed by countrymen not my own
swam under sprouting clouds		           I was born
testing    testing			              in a place Neruda dubbed ‘Dawn’s Rosy Cheek’
I spoke Yiddish soon after		      I was born
schvartze means Black  		      I was born
I hankered for chitlin’s & oxtails   enjoyed forbidden fruits
I wailed the blues			      with an ear for opera  but no peonies or peace lilies for me
I grooved with Pete Seeger	      I worshipped Paul Robeson &
we marched we protested		      we believed                                       we patienced
I lusted for excellence		      I sought success (American style)
I was born justice-oriented	      for all
like King  I was born dreamer	      Like Langston I deferred dreams   too
After reading We Charge Genocide
at age 9				                      I plotted expatriation at the age of 10
realized I was born in a place ripe
with false promises & hoods	     my country tis of thee   sweet land   				
I embraced your values 		     I drank your tea
then dropped your mic		     this caged bird flew because
this country that birthed me	       the Amerikkka I know
does not love me back   		     does not want me Black

From the writer

:: Account ::

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented a book-length petition to the United Nations entitled, We Charge Genocide, The Crime of Government Against the Negro People. This book documented (with graphic photographs) hundreds of lynching cases of Black Americans known to have occurred in the eighty-five years since the end of slavery (the number is estimated at 10,000 individuals.) I happened upon this book at the age of nine. I was a voracious reader and had been given carte blanche to read any book in my parents’ library. I was aghast and wondered what could possibly provoke a person, or groups of people, to levy such cruelty on other human beings. I promised myself, that, given the opportunity, I would leave the United States to live in another society. As I grew older, I developed a sense of dual self-perception, of which WEB DuBois spoke, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 2). This dual self-perception was another reason for my leaving the U.S.

The concept of flight figures prominently in my poetry, particularly, once my path to expatriation became clearer. I have grown interested in the concept of maroonage and have researched extensively the history of maroons (enslaved people who fled their bondage and sought refuge in swamps or hills) in the U.S. and the Caribbean. I have also done research on the African American folklore about the ‘flying Africans’, Blacks who escaped enslavement through flight.

Joanne Godley lives in Mexico City, having emigrated from the U.S. a year ago. She is a physician, writer, poet, and a first year MFA candidate in Poetry. She is a Meter Keeper in the Poetry Witch Community and an Anaphora Arts fellow in both poetry and fiction. Her poetry has been published in the Bellevue Literary Review, Mantis, Light, FIYAH, Pratik, among others. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her prose has been published in the Massachusetts Review, the Kenyon Review online, Juked, Memoir, among others. Her poetry chapbook, Picking Scabs from the Body History,features poems of witness and resistance. Her website is: joannegodley.com

2 Poems

Poetry / Andrew Hemmert

:: The Liquor Store Delivery Driver Considers Ornithology ::

A swift flies like a bat made of straight razors. In summer 
I watch them sweep and curve through the mazes of moving cars, 
chasing the proliferating insects—mosquitos and caddis, 
black flies whose guts rorschach my windshield in yellows and greens 
and always the swifts behind them, like hunger given weight
and weightlessness, like hunger given speed. The way they fly, 
it seems they do not remember the ground is there. 
And nothing makes me feel grounded like watching them. 
Watching them, I might as well be a cattail by a retention pond 
or a shopping cart sunk in that retention pond, or a pond 
full only of oily overflow and no red fish darting
through reeds. When a swift doubles back its belly feathers shine 
like surgery. I am driving my car full of liquor 
into the city, under the swifts’ oblivion joy.

:: The Liquor Store Delivery Driver Considers Quitting ::

Leaving feels like something for which there should be some ritual. 
On my last day at the store, a brand-new driver was t-boned 
in an intersection. I went to get him. Parsed his story 
from those of the witnesses, peeled the company decal 
off the totaled delivery car. The other driver 
though stumbling refused an ambulance. My driver spent 
the ride back to the store with his head in his hands. The ruined 
car we left in a restaurant parking lot for the morning.
What ritual for this? In the end I spent too much money 
on a bottle of rum and drove home under open skies. 
I left my uniform—a black t-shirt, a matching hoodie, 
a fake-gold magnetic nametag—lying on the counter, 
what else is there to say about it. A job is not a life. 
I went out into the night wearing only my own clothes.

From the writer

:: Account ::

When I moved to Thornton, Colorado, my first job was delivering liquor for a local liquor store. These deliveries were primarily residential, not retail. I’d been a patron at the store for a few months prior to receiving their email advertisement seeking delivery drivers. Having been out of work for nearly two years at that point due to the pandemic, I was eager to contribute to the household’s finances in whatever way possible. And having at the time recently completed my first Covid vaccine regiment, I felt relatively comfortable returning to a retail environment. Now, a year since having left that position, it’s still hard to capture the regular absurdity of being part of a liquor store delivery department. I’d anticipated that the job would provide me with countless stories I could use as fodder for poetry or fiction. And I’m still trying to figure out how to chisel most of those stories out. Unsurprisingly, driving factors heavily into the experience of these poems. And driving has been a major theme in my prior books. But this was my first opportunity to discuss driving in the context of personal labor.

Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (Pitt Poetry Series) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.

Kill the Birds

Poetry / Carolina Hotchandani

:: Kill the Birds ::

I live my life as the heroine 
of a novel I am authoring.

Hers is the story of a woman who moves 
from Chicago to Vermillion, South Dakota, 
to follow her husband’s job.
It comes with better benefits than hers.

The story she tells could be my own,
or it could be the story of insurance
and the things insurance makes us do
when we feel the soft spot 
on the baby’s skull and imagine the world 
impressing itself upon that head.

I could console myself:
the new insurance is spectacular.
It slays fears like a great, muscular hero,
thundering into the scene astride a horse,
making me blush like a virgin in an 18th-century novel—
a foil for the heroine I’d been molding.

At the university where I begin to work,
my students ask for leave to go pheasant hunting.
Their hunting excursions are sacred, they say—
religious rites, or practically so.

Go. 
Miss class. 
Kill the birds.

Confer upon a lost life 
a meaning. A pheasant 
knocked out of flight,
hurtling over the snow, 
will be your glory.

What’s vermillion, I wonder,
about this white, white town.

Outside my window, the striped cornfields
write new lines onto my brain.

How dare they, I think.
I’m the writer, after all.

One day, walking along the gravel driveway,
I spot a dead fox—
a splotch 
on the snowed-over corn stubble.

Vermillion.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I am intrigued by how we relate to the fictions that we consume and write—how we project ourselves onto characters and, if we are writers, how we can become moved by our own creations, as if they were not entities we’d brought into being ourselves. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had a profound influence on me in my youth, and as I grew into adulthood, I revisited it, reading it as a portrayal of how the artist’s creation can be a monstrous mirror, a beloved, a therapist, a sinister twin. Writers often speak of writing as therapeutic, but I’m especially taken with the ways that writing can haunt and cast strange shadows on “real” life.

Carolina Hotchandani won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize for her debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, released this past September. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska.

3 Poems

Poetry / Katherine Indermaur

:: In the First Days of Pilgrimage ::

O make of me your holiest echo
Shape me by my wandering       may all
I’ve kept close on this earth be shorn from me
Like dust from mountains’ uplifted arms
May I crawl ever closer to your name

:: At the Shrine of St. Thecla ::

For days I too sat by the blue window   asking
Nothing    Lord    only waiting to be struck
a tongueless bell    but you arrive gentle
As newborn lambs’ shepherd     you  
Kneel gentle as the lioness with her cubs 
Amid the closing in of bloodthirsty men 
Gentle as the tune the nightwatch soldier hums
As the plum tongue his armor entombs

:: Absolution That Begins and Begins and Begins ::

There is nothing beautiful left in me
When I reach the mountaintop
No desire       no forgiveness
Every stone    face    star
Up here bare as distance 
I pitch me out of reach

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems come from a manuscript that takes up the true story of Egeria, a female Christian pilgrim who traveled from her home in western Europe to the biblical Holy Land in the 380s AD. Some of her original travel writing has survived to today. One of the earliest female mountaineers, Egeria is the first known woman to summit Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo. She was not, so far as historians understand, a wealthy woman, but the rights women held in the Roman Empire at that time enabled her to travel relatively freely, and occasionally with a military escort to ensure safety. (The very same Roman Empire that executed Jesus adopted Christianity as its official religion less than three centuries later. Egeria would have been born about twenty years after this change.) These spare poems explore Egeria’s pilgrimage. They are both filled with and emptied by the desert landscape in which Egeria finds herself, and which would have been incredibly foreign to her.

Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review and is the winner of the Black Warrior Review 2019 Poetry Contest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing has appeared in Ecotone, Electric Literature, Frontier Poetry, the Journal, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Deformation

Poetry / Adriana X. Jacobs

:: Deformation ::

A mother falls through a bed of chalk flowers, pulling her child behind her. A store 
crumbles, spilling votives into the street. The rats pour out of a manhole cover, 
shedding future plagues. And after they clear, a mailbox tips over. The polaroid of 
the family cat falls into the void (they will find him in a thousand years). The glossy 
beetles slide off their pins and take flight. Someone painted “everything will be ok” 
on the bridge. This is how it will be when it is over. The morning news and missing 
faces stitched together. While the wires hold together. Branches covered with the 
luggage of layovers. The restaurant laid out for missed reservations. And under the 
sink, poached chicken in duck fat waiting to be served. There will be no theory for 
the shells in the child’s pocket. For the threads of neon green and yellow, stems of 
flowers stripped from the pavement, migrating into the lower strata, and staying 
there, like a tear on a chin. One of the els collides with the legs of a cockroach to 
form an ancient language. The legs of the k will keep on going, like one of those half 
bodies still walking ahead.

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Deformation” comes from a poetry book manuscript I have been working on that is inspired by video games like The Last of Us, Plague Tale: Requiem, and Death Stranding. Both the book and this poem imagine a leftover world carefully explored and picked over by those who remain. A few months into the Covid-19 pandemic, I read an article about the closure of restaurants in New York City and the future of the food industry. The line that stood out for me concerned the preservation of par-cooked chicken in duck fat. The chef wasn’t sure that this would work, so I took this as an opportunity to try a different method and poach the chicken instead. I imagined someone stumbling into the restaurant kitchen decades from now. Maybe they would be hiding or returning to a place full of good memories of another time. They would find air-tight bags of chicken encased in duck fat and maybe have the best meal of their life. Or the rats would get to it first. This image became the kernel of “Deformation,” which approaches crisis as a seismic event, rearranging memories, routines, language. But in most of my poems, this process is never completed; rather, I am interested in the space and time between breakdown and repair, the state of being in crisis, at the edge of greed and vulnerability, generosity and violence.

Adriana X. Jacobs is a poet, scholar, and translator based in Oxford, England and Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have appeared recently in Blackbox Manifold, Asoophit, Place de la Sorbonne, Poetry Dispatch, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her translations from Hebrew include Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press), winner of the 2022 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and Merav Givoni Hrushovski’s End— (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023). She is the author of the poetry zine Afterlife is Sweet (rinky dink press) and the chapbook The Turning (forthcoming, Dancing Girl Press). She teaches Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Oxford.

Good Men

Poetry / Sarah Kersey

:: Good Men ::

for JWH

I keep changing. This is
forever.
The wind applauds my red motorcycle
as it breaks 50 mph before
it sputters out on the side of the road,
gravel gray like gospel. Shattered.
Do you need help?
Tenderness reduces to copper,
calculates what I owe. I’ve climbed
into beds, onto faces, on top of waists,
now into this white pickup truck.
Bikers help each other.
When I told the elders I no longer
wished to be known as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses,
you, a good man, the only man I love,
cried into the Zoom screen; as if
the weather had changed 
to cool morning mist.
You knew everything I’d lost and wet all of it
so I wouldn’t crack.
Listen to me, you said.
I was going to be alone.
Kicking off gravel caught in my boots,
I got into the truck.
Next time, the man said,
take off your helmet.
It will signal to other bikers that
you need help.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Every year since September 2014, I always attempt to write a poem about one of the greatest losses I’ve had in my life. I was attempting that poem last year when it became too difficult to continue the draft. At around that time, I took a poetry workshop called Poetry and Intimacy, which was led by Taneum Bambrick. One of their prompts was to write about an intimate moment between strangers. “Good Men” is the result. It’s based on my actual experience of running out of gas while riding my motorcycle in New Jersey, and a man who stopped on the side of the road to help. I was also stuck on a separate draft of a poem about my disassociation from the Jehovah’s Witnesses in December 2021. All these losses merged in my brain, on and off the page. Yet, this poem embodies a hope I’d never previously imagined for myself, even as I wrestle between my old and new self, my old and new beliefs.

Sarah Kersey is a poet and x‑ray technologist who lives right outside Boston, MA. She has received support from Tin House Workshop. Their debut chapbook Anacrusis is forthcoming with Newfound in 2024. She tweets @sk__poet.

The Best Thing About Poetry Isn’t Poetry

Poetry / David Kirby

:: The Best Thing About Poetry Isn’t Poetry::

When I take my morning walk, I used to wave at every car that came my way, but only half of
the drivers waved back, so I stopped waving, but the half that did wave became
accustomed to my friendly greeting, and now they wave at me before I can wave at them,
so I don’t know what to do.
I do know I wouldn’t be having these problems if Frank O’Hara were my friend.
Ashbery said O’Hara “gave you the feeling of belonging to an exclusive club with him, as if you
had hooked into some big, secret continuum of life. Frank had a personal kind of idea
about things, which made you feel you could think independently, too.”
And according to Ginsberg, O’Hara’s “feelings for me seemed to vibrate with my feelings for
myself. I think he saw my ideal self-image; he articulated it and made it sound right.”

Remember your first set of friends?
When you were a kid, you’d go to their houses for dinner and learned not only about different
foods but also different ways of doing things.
You learned that capers weren’t fish eyes but flower buds, that garlic was an actual vegetable
and not a hard dry powder.
Sometimes you saw grown-ups drink wine for dinner instead of milk or Pepsi, and when they
gave you a sip, you didn’t like it, but you knew you would.
Then there was the time you saw Ryan Mattingly’s dad pat Mrs. Mattingly’s butt in the kitchen
and waited for her to scowl at him the way your mom would, but she smiled instead.

Some of my best friends ever are the ones I argued with most, such as Ed, Dennis, and Ken, my
grad-school roommates.
Grad school had two effects on us: it made us think we were smarter than we were, and it
furnished us with quotes to use like rapiers as we feinted and lunged in our nightly duels,
a favorite being Blake’s “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau / Mock on, ’tis all in
vain. / You throw the sand against the wind, / And the wind blows it back again.”
Somebody, Ed or Dennis, say, would say, “Would somebody explain to me what structuralism is
so I’ll know whether or not I’m a structuralist?” and someone else, maybe Ken or me,
would say, “You’re wasting your time. Just say what you like and why you like it,” and
whoever said the first thing would say “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau!” and the
talk would go on forever because we weren’t contradicting each other, Blake was.
A good quote attributes the animus to someone else, not you. Or it’s like a potholder you use to
pick up the argument when the argument’s too hot to handle.

Mainly, though we spent our afternoon sitting on the floor of the library swapping books of
poems and reading aloud to each other in stagey whispers, our backs against the stacks
like harvesters in a painting by Millet taking a break from the soul-numbing grind of
work.

Those guys are all married now. Or re-married.
And far away.
I never see them any more.
I see them every day.
Isn’t that how friendship works?
Thank you, poetry! Thank you for my friends and the friends to come.

When you’re young and you tell people you’re going to study art and poetry, they look at you as
though you’re crazy. When you’re older and you tell people you studied art and poetry,
they say, “I wish I’d done that.”

From the writer

:: Account ::

Ever get the feeling that your favorite poets are writing the same good poems over and over again? I started thinking that way about my own work a few years ago, so I tried some new tricks: shorter poems, longer poems, different formats, edgier syntax. Painters and songwriters reinvent themselves all the time, so why not poets? At the same time I decided to stop thinking in terms of good, better, best. The thing is to be different. If that leads to work you or your readers like, fine, but if it doesn’t, without a doubt these changes will lead you to something new and then to something even newer, a way of writing you haven’t come close to imagining. Remember, poetry is the long con, and reinvention means you’ll stay in the game that much longer. I call some of these new poem types “Ginsbergs.” That doesn’t mean that they read like Ginsberg poems, just that that old bear’s spirit freed me to take chances.

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and which was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him “a literary treasure of our state.”

2 Poems

Poetry / Louie Leyson

:: pinay cyborg manifesto ::

I’ve been sick with woman’s want
to become beyond body—closer to chrome

glint & pearl oil than blood, than organ. this is how
I understand perfection after years watching

lola tuck herself beneath shadow, bending
like soft metal in her mistaking of bronze

for burning. my lipsticked titas under willow trees,
a collective absence of bone. each brown, full

limb a bruise refusing to heal, each charcoal
shade a fruitless makeshift cast. august a lesson

in how the injured pinay body has parts too rooted
to the human. when nanay said I wish she was born

whiter she meant wishing I entered this world intact,
born a heap of gleaming silver. & how could I

blame her? after so many motions to smooth the lines
rippling the round lake of her face, drawn from the wisps

of a father’s smoke. we both know the cyborg
is an unholy thing, spared edenic origins & therefore

cannot die. there is nothing she dreams of more
than to reach that point of endless healing, to spend

hours submerged in freezing water but still swim up,
intact. to drive through agate swaths of fire but still

speed out, old toyota charred to nothing, skin painted
ash like dove belly. perhaps there’s already

a cyborg quality to the pinay’s long survival, which
to this point has been bulletproof. I don’t know

titanium sturdy enough to withstand the plain hurt
of centuries, coalescing to meet my nanay like wounds

from ancient lives. pained, we keep peeling tamarind
for sinigang. keep gathering okra, patis, chilli pepper,

taro. isn’t that bionic? isn’t that miraculous?

:: a conversation between two choirs ::

ave, ave, ave maria. i am trying to find the root
of silence, like a voice that carries another voice
inside. mary thy praises we sing to the backs of a hundred
upturned heads. like tulips asleep inside the pillow
of your fist. in heaven the blessed crouch to dirty
dance atop a fruitless garden. a stone that falls in winter
& the intact walls of its crater. erupting from our chests
a bird named alleluia! alleluia! how stones make perfect bowls
out of snow. oh lord you arrive & sorrow goes like sparrow heads
buried in holy bark. is there anything more sharp than below
zero quiet. sun on the blood on the wood of the cross, bright
on bright on bright. is anything born from an absence
of mouths. on the pew i shake like a root in the rain.
from the soundlessness of a dead bug. twelfth Sunday
of ordinary time. mistaking a womb for the cave
of my throat. or was it during lenten season.
entombing the wound of my tongue
when you come. holy spirit i too burn like the wick
of a violent candle. a violet candle lit up & noiseless
in its yearning. yes, yes that’s what i always
meant. amen.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I was tired of wanting wordlessly. I needed some context, a texture upon which to contemplate desire, and so I wrote these poems. Desire, then, dictates the tone of these poems. Much of it restrained, as queer desire often is. There is so much on earth to long for. I needed to put that longing down, build it a bed in which to sleep through the night.

In her seminal essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway writes, “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.” Since first encountering this, I’ve obsessively figured the cyborg in my own work as a utopian shapeshifter, or as a narrative machine with which to propel ourselves from the damaging mythologies that have been instilled in us since childhood. In “pinay cyborg manifesto” specifically, I allude to mythologies around what constitutes an ideal Filipina that have been informed by centuries of occupation, patriarchy, and violence. “This is a dream not of a common language,” Haraway also writes, “but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.” It is through the cyborg’s potential towards this “powerful infidel heteroglossia” that I find new and liberated modes of possibility, of existing at last as myself in the world.

Louie Leyson is a UBC graduate and writer who lives on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and National Magazine Awards. You can find their works in Catapult, The Malahat Review, Palette Poetry, The Rupture, Nat. Brut, Plenitude, and elsewhere. Their twitter is @aswangpoem, their instagram is @cyborgsaints.

In the Dark Heaven of an Hour

Poetry / Joshua Robbins

:: In the Dark Heaven of an Hour ::

What if we can do no better
                                                   than this: on our own
	      and the only witnesses to the gravel
and weeds we are meant to become,
                                                                  but, for now,

	       ignore,
                            listening instead	
for the world to play the infinite
	       song of its last breath
                                                      as space

gathers like the crowd
	       at the edge
                                of police strobes
and caution tape

	       where the mini-mart sign’s buzz-glow
casts the assemblers’ shifting shadows
	       onto hot asphalt

and moon-washed oil slicks
	       uniform in their stillness
after the first good rain in months has receded

	       just as soon as it fell,
                                                       just as the body
of the late-shift cashier inside the store
	       fell out of dream

hearing the entrance bell’s
                                                  double-chime
	       like the declamatory end rhyme
of an unfinished poem

	      penned in his notebook’s margins
before dozing off,
	      as if he knew the night

could not do
                       without us
	      reflected hours later
in the doors’ glass we stared through

	      as though through
                                                  our own sleep
broken by gunshots
	      at the end of our street

lined with oblivious crepe myrtles
                                                              devoted, in a way
	      I cannot understand,
                                               to this world,
which no pale god watches

	      tumble through the universe
as he rocks on his heels somewhere
                                                                 in the dark
	      heaven of an hour

before bed and too late
	      to do anything
                                          to stop
the thief in the night who pulls
	
	      his trigger twice and puts
one in the gut and one
	      in the chest
                                     of the man

on the other side of the counter,
	      who might have told us how
                                                                   we are more
than fragmented ruins or shards
                                                            of the ordinary

	     things one gives one’s life to
and which were already gone for him
	     that moment he looked up and out
                                                                              and past

this world that kills
	      as calmly and deliberately
as a perfect final couplet might
                                                         if we could read it

	      now or after we’ve all
had a drink or a smoke on the porch
                                                                   to calm the nerves, we’d say,
	      before morning yields

to the traffic’s groans,
	      as we shield our eyes
and drive off
                         toward nowhere.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem is an elegy for a young man working the late-night cashier shift at a neighborhood convenience store near our house. He was shot and killed in a robbery. Even as I call this poem an elegy, I do wonder if I throw the term around too loosely here. Perhaps I like to think the contemporary elegy has transcended the standards of the Romantics and Victorians and even the rebellious Modernists? Or perhaps even today’s elegy cannot escape the trappings of the elegiac tradition, Freudian substitution and compensatory return, a laying on of flowers, etc. But how to write an elegy in this case, in this moment, that does not abstract the subject of the poem for the sake of amplifying or illuminating some so-called “truth” only deliverable by the speaker or poet? I’ve tried to write an elegy that isn’t concerned with what’s true or comforting as much as it is with assimilating grief into the reality of the moment rather than into solace and understanding. Shades of Levis here, but the tragically murdered kid, who I did not know, was not put on this earth to be an example of something else in my elegy. And so I am trying to put the factness of the kid behind the counter before you, so you won’t mistake him for anything else, this kid needlessly dead, because it is only by making the poem assimilate into its realities of its moment—police tape, rain, poverty and violence, suburbia, religious doubt—that any space to imagine his death in the abstract is removed. And then, afterwards, perhaps, it is possible to move from the poem to a consideration of the socio-political actualities we must resist.

Joshua Robbins is the author of Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), part of the Miller Williams Series in Poetry, and Eschatology in Crayon Wax (Texas Review Press, 2024). His recognitions include, among others, the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Incarnate Word and lives in San Antonio.

Counterpoint For Prophetic Voices

Poetry / CJ Scruton

:: Counterpoint For Prophetic Voices ::

god and satan are not a part
of your body // yet
                                                                                  in most bible stories //
                                                                                  until
they agree
to invade // test some things out // see
                                                                                  what will move you
                                                                                  what will pull or break //
if I say you’re not
there // loudly // eventually
                                                                                  it will come
                                                                                  to be true //

if you floated in a saltbath
with headphones and a mask
                                                                                  still there would be
                                                                                  voices music //

would you // listen // tenderness unnests
in the body from places // we can point to //
                                                                                  endocrine system // brain //
                                                                                  cardiovascular

response // we call heart
ache // the feeling of clenching
                                                                                  fistsized // reminder
                                                                                  you haven’t taken // breath
of real depth // for weeks // listen // to me
I’m telling you // there is stone
                                                                                  where once
                                                                                  there was shade //
you were not
wrong not // about this //
                                                                                  I told you // love is not
                                                                                  a dead letter
we hold // unreturned // when
there’s nowhere // to arrive

From the writer

:: Account ::

A good account traces an arc, a motion, a work’s act of arriving. But after years, I still don’t know what to do with the fact that I don’t have a clear arc in my life for arriving to queerness or transness. There are fuzzy story-memories, out-of-sequence images I can recall, but the realities of my own body and identity often feel almost as if they snuck up on me, a rescuing hand held out in waters I had no idea I was sinking in. It’s a story of bodies, a clear one—to me—but a story that most stories would miss since the words for it tend to make themselves elusive.

Through the process of transition, I’ve increasingly been drawn in poetry to forms that suggest gaps, missed translations, meanings that seem obvious—and perhaps are obvious, by logics outside human language—but that don’t always get to be recorded clearly in writing. That resist this urge to tell the story perfectly, choosing exactly the right words.

It’s an exercise in trust, in vulnerability: knowing that I can’t say the full story, and knowing what violence can occur when others are allowed to write the story of marginalized people’s bodies for them. Knowing how often people want to write a narrative that’s convenient for them first and foremost. But through these poetry experiments, I have also been accepting that openness and questioning is often the only way to escape prescribed narratives for what our bodies can be and do.

It’s an intoxicating possibility to try and establish trans rights in clear, “logical” language that will make transphobes understand or change their minds. Except that pursuit doesn’t work. Even when we express ourselves as clear as day, they act as if our bodies and stories are blank pages for them to fill in. The pressure to assimilate, to express truths in a way that will be accepted, acceptable, will never actually work. The extended hand we reach for here is not a lifeline, but a snake, a tensed coil of fangs.

The problem I’m trying to parse out, then, is finding language open enough to leave room to explore my own feelings and embodiment without totally succumbing to the fear of such violences. And sometimes, this requires facing those fears head-on. What if I am the monster, or let myself be? What if I want to know the past and future of my body, but admit this knowledge is impossible? In my poems I’m exploring what happens when I lean into the lack of clear, singular narratives for queer and trans embodiment but also invite more possibilities of being known by myself and others in community.

CJ Scruton is a trans, non-binary poet from the Lower Mississippi River Valley currently living on the Great Lakes, where they teach and research ghost stories. Their work has previously appeared in Shenandoah, New South, Quarterly West, and other journals. Their full-length manuscript has been a semifinalist for the YesYes Books Pamet River Prize and a finalist for the Willow Springs Books Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize.

A Boy Free on Christmas Morning

Fiction / Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya

:: A Boy Free on Christmas Morning ::

It was a day in October, 2005. And like all days in October in a proper academic year, the term had just begun, new schemes of work written in chalk on the boards, old friends reconnecting, and new bonds getting fastened. Old classmates embraced and shook hands and clapped backs and shared stories from the holiday. They paused in their high laughter and plosives only to dust out their lockers, clear the walls of cobwebs and the floors of litter, and copy down the new timetable. It was a glittering, unbroken air.

“Tomiwa!”

The call had pierced through the staccato din—behind which he had gratefully slipped—through the thickness of his thoughts, and reached him like an arrow. He whirled around, his heart badabooming like drums. It was Christopher Ayomikun. Of course, it was Christopher Ayomikun. Only Christopher Ayomikun barked out his name like that. Only Christopher Ayomikun cared enough to see him. He waited in his seat. Christopher Ayomikun swaggered up, one corner of his mouth lifted as usual in a sneer. Tomiwa waited, his arm resting on the slight swell of his well-worn duffel bag, which slouched almost weightlessly into his locker. Running to the bus stop every morning and every afternoon with it on his back posed no problems for him. He had so few books.

“Hey, Tomiwa.” Christopher Ayomikun finally stopped by his desk, standing too close for comfort, stretching out his hand. “How are you?”

Tomiwa’s eyes slid down to the proffered hand. He gaped. It was surprising enough that Ayomikun had called him “Fagstard” as usual—Christopher Ayomikun had an animated imagination—but what was even more astonishing was Christopher Ayomikun offering him—him—a handshake.

“Well, well, well, are you going to shake my hand, or are you going to disgrace me in front of the whole class?” Ayomikun asked. The noises in the classroom had diminished into a steady, single thrumming; people were already beginning to watch. The boy cradling his old bag dared not look around to see, but he felt the hungry eyes, as strongly as he did each time Christopher Ayomikun engaged him inside or outside the classroom. Christopher Ayomikun spoke again, “Come on, pal, this is a new term. Old things are gone. I’ve realized how childish I have been. Let’s start afresh.”

His voice had taken on a softness; his eyes, too. His sneer was also stretching into a smile that looked sincere. And, as if “Tomiwa” had not been enough, he had called him “pal”. Tomiwa’s mud walls were crumbling. His heart lifted. He took Ayomikun’s hand, carefully at first, and then more confidently, his fingers curled around Ayomikun’s firm palm. “Good morning,” he mumbled, feeling stupid; he wasn’t sure that was what he was supposed to say. He felt as in a dream. Something ice-cool and sweet, like glucose, was spreading inside his chest. He wondered if he should look around the class and smile triumphantly at the incredulity that must be pasted on those faces. He stopped wondering and looked around. They were all gawping at the scene: his hand in Ayomikun’s, Ayomikun’s covering his in a full firm clasp. A miracle kinship. He felt like screaming. He parted his lips, not sure what it was he would utter, but just then Christopher Ayomikun screeched and, with a violent jerk, flung Tomiwa’s hand off. It smacked against the desk. He spread out his arms like an actor and addressed the class.

“See? I told you. Fagstard is not a monster. You can actually shake his hand and he will not rape you senseless!”

Then he burst into gales of laughter; some boys joined in. Tomiwa recognized them as the ones who had waylaid him on his way home from school, once, twice, three times, and beaten him up for walking like a girl. They were like Christopher Ayomikun—tall, big, muscular, things he was not. Because of them, he now ran instead of walking. Because of them, he had stopped going out to the canteen during break, just so they couldn’t see him walking and have cause to beat him again. Not that he had the luxury of frequenting the canteen anyway; his pocket money was N20, every day. Including those days they had Junior WASSCE lessons and closed at 6 pm.

Christopher Ayomikun’s laughter slowed and lowed to sporadic hiccups, but the rest of the class—even the twin girls that were voted “Most Quiet” last term—had taken up the mirth and were all doubled over. Tomiwa’s heart sank. His palm stung. Sweat broke down his back and temples, despite the sunlessness of the morning. Goose pimples rose on his skin, as if someone had splashed water on him and pushed him into a basin filled with raw rice. His eyes welled up.

This was indeed a new term. He might not survive it. Somebody shook the bell for assembly time. The class made for the door, girls and boys pressing against him, pushing past him, some screaming when they came in contact with him, the girls looking as if they wanted to spit, some of the boys holding their hands over their behinds, their eyes distended in mock terror. He tried to slip past them but in his haste, his already squiggly zipper ripped open and his rat-eaten books spilled out to the floor. His classmates watching from the corridor erupted in loud laughter. He sank to the floor, willing it to yawn open and take him.

“Clumsy homo,” they chanted and darted their eyes around in case a teacher or a prefect was coming.

Where he sat on the floor, the boy hugged his split bag to his chest and wept.

* * *

Tomiwa was the first of two sons. Born to a gardener in the rustic town of Ijebu-Ode, he learned early enough to occupy spaces like a thin shadow. His father raked lawns, planted allamanda bushes, trimmed sun-bleached flowers for a stingy rich family, and collected N4,000 pay at the end of the month. Sometimes, the salary would come. Sometimes, it would come late. And then there were times it would not come at all. During these times, it was hell for Tomiwa, his little sickle-celled brother, Enitan, and their mother. She had a makeshift kiosk in front of a weather-beaten bungalow, where she sold soap and sweets and matches and cigarettes. There, they had rented a one-room apartment, and they owed the cantankerous landlord N15,500.

Tomiwa’s father, on those days of no pay, would arrive home in the dead of night and in a soggy whiff of alcohol stench, his shirt front stained with beer vomit, his face grotesque, his lips loose and his eyes bulging. When Tomiwa’s mother confronted him about where he had been and what he had been up to, he beat her up. His staggering and swaying did not dull his punches; they could have smacked holes in any living body. His words slurry, his articulations blurry, he would rain curses on his wife, his children, his rich employees and the poor country as a whole. Then he would resume beating his wife, hold her by the neck, yank and tousle her hair, and force her down to her knees. Where is my food? No food! Why didn’t you cook? No money! Must you wait for me before you cook? You have too many debts? No sales? Unfortunate woman! Oloriburuku obinrin! Your legs are bad! My life scattered the day I married you! These played out in front of Tomiwa and his little brother, who always burst into loud crying and so stopped Tomiwa from crying loudly as well, for he would have to hold his brother close and console him.

Then, a Saturday came. His brother had a crisis—the fourth that month—and his mother had to rush him to a small, unregistered clinic. Tomiwa watched her clamber onto the pillion of an okada, his heart palpitating where he sat washing his over-patched school uniform beside the house. He had just wrung the soap out of his shorts when his father called him in and told him he would have to drop out of school. Tomiwa stood and stared, the foam drying on his hands.

“Baba, what did you say, sir?”

His father coughed. Tomiwa noticed the new drawn shade in his eyes, the newer unsightly crisscross of veins on his forehead. He had always looked sick, from excessive drinking and working in the sun, but not this much. Tomiwa wished things were different for his father, for them all.

“E pele, sa,” he said in concern.

“Do you have owu elepo in your ears?” his father shot at him. “I said you will have to stop going to school. I don’t have the strength to send you again.”

The world spun rapidly inside Tomiwa’s head; all of his life gathered up in his throat. He propped his wrist against his lips, surprised by the suddenness of his own crying. Perhaps it was the way his father had shouted it. Without thinking, without choosing to be dramatic, he sank to his knees and started wringing his hands in plea. He thought little of his actions, of what his father would see. All he knew was that he was pleading to be allowed to continue in school.

His father sneered at him, a cold sneer that froze Tomiwa in his movements. His father’s bloodshot eyes ran up and down him, until he thought he was about to spit on him.

“How did I end up with a son like you sef?” his father said, and started hacking again. His coughing shook his body.

“E pele, sa.”

“Kneeling and moving your hands like a girl.” He spat the phlegm in Tomiwa’s direction. Another fit seized his willowy frame.

Tomiwa scrambled up to get him some water.

“Stop there, my friend!” his father barked. “Where you think say you dey go?”

“Nowhere, sir.” Tomiwa shivered, stuck, confused, afraid to use his hands lest he did something to further enrage his father.

“My ears are full. I hear how you laugh like an idiot when those homeless boys on our street touch your body. I am warning you. No child of mine will bring abomination into this house. E better make I kill that son with my bare hands than let him see that day.” He launched into another raspy paroxysm.

Tears bloomed into Tomiwa’s eyes again, but he fought it. He had to kill vulnerability. Boys didn’t cry, his father once said. “E pele, sa,” he said again. This time, he felt the sympathy for his father more keenly. He moved uncertainly towards him, his hand stretched.

“Get out of my sight!” his father blared, eyes flashing.

Tomiwa ran out, his eyes stinging, and for a while he couldn’t see his white vest as he washed it.

His father left work and took fully to drinking and owing a pile of money at the local bar in town. Often, in the middle of the day, furious service girls would drag him home and demand payment from Tomiwa’s mother. There were afternoons Tomiwa and his mother found him crumpled in the gutter, babbling old hymns. How his mother stood alone and Enitan did not die of his crises, and how Tomiwa did not drop out of school, Tomiwa could not say. But he wished he had dropped out anyway.

* * *

Dropping out dangled in his mind—a fresh offer at escape—that day in October. The day he prayed the floor of his classroom should open and gulp him in. The same day Abdul came into his life. Abdul was a youth service corps member newly posted to the community school. Tall, firm-jawed Abdul, with a wide forehead and wider shoulders and a little stutter that made the students find his every word even more precious. When he stepped into their class that morning, after the first three teachers had taught and left, he told them he came to teach Mathematics and Mathematics only.

“I can solve all problems. Careful—all arithmetical problems. Don’t bring your life’s problems to me. Don’t bring your boyfriend-and-girlfriend issues to me.”

A ripple went through the class.

“Those ones are problems I can’t solve. I have those problems, too, you hear? So make everyone go solve their problems on their own, abeg. Government no dey pay me allowee for that one.”

The class burst into laughter. Except Tomiwa, who was still moping over his ruined school bag. Abdul smiled and turned to the board.

After school, a school prefect accosted Tomiwa and told him Abdul wanted to see him in the staff room. Stiffly, his mind blank, he made for the detached building. Abdul sat, a Pacesetters novel held open with his thumb, and asked Tomiwa his name. “And also tell me why you were looking moody during his class in the morning.”

Tomiwa parted his lips to speak, but it was tears, not words, that broke free. It annoyed him, that he was crying before this stranger-teacher in tight white vest and green khaki pants. It was like a scene from all those TV melodramas his classmates always chirped about during Free Period. He pressed his hands to his face. He felt like screaming at him: Leave me alone!

“Nothing, sir,” he mumbled. “My head was aching. My name is Tomiwa Arogundade.”

The corper gawped.

Later, as Tomiwa walked home through the bushes flanking a lonely path, Christopher Ayomikun and his boys leaped out at him, their checkered shirts undone and tied around their waists to reveal off-white singlets, long lithe canes swishing to and fro in their hands. Tomiwa staggered backward. They had never brought canes before. He wished he knew any other route home, but this was the only lane. The boys surrounded him, leering and sneering and whistling. He thought of his mother praying into the night on her knees, reeling out psalms after psalms for divine protection from evil and its doers. Tomiwa had managed to memorize only Psalm 23 completely. He reached for it now like a talisman. He muttered it earnestly.

Christopher Ayomikun detached himself from the circle and neared Tomiwa with his cocksure swagger. Tomiwa stared. He should run. These were people with heightened predatory skills. These were people who grew up watching too many American and Chinese films. The silence, punctuated by the twittering of bush birds, stretched on for too long. They lolled the canes in their hands and peered at him thinly, like lizards. Tomiwa’s heart started throbbing again, and when Christopher finally spoke, it was like someone splashed a bucket of ice cubes down his shoulders.

“Hey, Fagstard, how about we get your disgusting rosy ass pro-per-ly whipped?”

Tomiwa held onto his loose bag. “Please. E jo. I don’t want any more trouble. Let me just go home.”

“Hey, hey!” Christopher Ayomikun threw his hands about in that theatrical way common with pulpit clowns. “The sissy pleads!” He made a face and aped Tomiwa’s words.

“Come on, Chief CA!” one of the other boys screeched. “Why we dey waste time?” Somebody fit come and interrupt na. Make we naked this girlie and see wetin him been dey cover!”

Tomiwa went numb.

“Well, well, well,” Christopher Ayomikun starred his role again, hands on hips, “you are about to regret ever being born into this world, you abomination.” He revolved on his heels. “He’s all yours!”

They yelled in unison, their canes raised high, and raced toward Tomiwa, who stood transfixed in the middle of the path. It was over. It was beyond him what atrocity it was they were going to do to him this time. He closed his eyes, like when the lights of the world go out, slumped to the ground, and waited for the onslaught.

He could not see anything, but he heard a sudden silence. Someone had bounded into the road. They all stiffened in their tracks. The figure approached steadily, unflinchingly. A tall broad figure. White vest. Green pants. A green cap.

“It’s Corper Abdul!” someone screamed.

Tomiwa’s earlobes thudded with feet. They all melted into the bush, leaving behind their weapons and a few sandals. Tomiwa opened his eyes and looked hard through the winking green of his vision. It was Corper Abdul. The man pulled him up. Tomiwa glanced up through the trees to send his thanks to whatever god was there. He watched his savior vanish in a blur of white and green, and he didn’t know what next to feel, to do.

* * *

Abdul gave chase, briefly. He caught none of the boys. They had moved through the forest like lightning through slippery clouds.

* * *

“Are you hurt?”

Tomiwa shook his head no.

“Are you not that boy in JSS3 A?”

Tomiwa nodded, feeling self-pityingly young and helpless.

“Where do you live?”

“Just before the busy road.” He pointed vaguely. The numbness was beginning to clear.

“Hmm. The Corpers’ Lodge is not too far from there. Let’s walk together.”

He nodded, his tongue gluing itself back to the roof of his mouth.

They started walking; their footfalls crunched the crisp October-dried leaves underfoot and echoed in the trees. The silence grew too loud.

“Hey, brother, I don’t know you much.”

The man sounded a little forceful, as if he had rummaged and rummaged around in his brain to find the least embarrassing way to continue the conversation, and so wouldn’t condone another listless response. Perhaps it was his baritone. Perhaps it was his broad shoulders. Perhaps it was his clear open face, which gave the sensation of staring into a cloudless sky. Or perhaps it was simply that the man had called him “brother”, but Tomiwa suddenly found his tongue unclinging from the roof of his mouth, like a weight in flight.

“I really don’t know much about you either, sir,” he said.

Abdul smiled, apparently encouraged.

“I finished from Obafemi Awolowo University. Department of Mathematics. I am Yoruba, from Lagos, and serving in a Yoruba town. I am one of the luckiest, I guess.”

Tomiwa giggled, a little amused, a little stunned by himself.

“Okay, sir.”

A bird cried.

“So…when did all this rubbish start?”

Tomiwa watched a lone lizard slither through a clump of bitter leaves. “Since I came into the school, sir. Three years ago.”

“Ya Allah!”

Tomiwa smiled, wryly amused, thinking of what his mother was most likely to say if he ever told her about this part of the conversation: she would snap her fingers and quote “do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers”. His mother, he had often guiltily thought, was an incurious, unintelligent, faithless worshipper.

“But why didn’t you report them to the school authorities?”

“I did, sir. I did. The vice-principal himself has punished them over this issue. But they waylaid me again and beat the daylights out of me and swore to kill me if I reported them again.”

Abdul stopped. “And you believed them?”

Tomiwa nodded, his eyes heavy and shadowed.

“This is unacceptable!” Abdul bawled. Then he caught himself, as if he would have said more. He inhaled deeply. “Your parents—what about them?”

Tomiwa thought about his father’s beer-dark face, his mother’s blank exhausted stare and his brother’s pained breathless look.

“I…um…couldn’t approach them. I didn’t want them involved.”

“To your own detriment?”

For a while, Tomiwa thought Abdul was going to slap him. He had raised his voice and a new energy had entered him. But he only walked on, his face turned away.

“I overheard one of those imps calling you something,” Abdul said. “I couldn’t hear it clearly. What was it?”

A new, heavy silence fell.

“They…call…me…Fagstard.” Tomiwa’s voice trembled.

“Fag-what?” Abdul’s face crumpled into lines of utter confusion.

“Fagstard, sir.”

Abdul scratched his head. “Well, my brother, help your big brother out o. ‘Fang’ I know. ‘Custard’ I know. But which one is ‘Fagstard’? They did not teach us this in school o.”

Tomiwa smiled sadly, touched by Abdul’s discretion, his deliberate avoidance of words that hurt like knives, but he also wished Abdul had hurled those words anyway.

“Sir, I use the dictionary a lot. I am sure Ayomikun formed the word out of a joining of the words ‘fag’ and ‘bastard’.”

A shadow fell between Abdul’s thick eyebrows. “No, Tomiwa. You can’t be so sure about that.”

Tomiwa took a deep calming breath before he spoke. “It’s okay, sir. I know what I saw in the dictionary, and I also know what I saw in Christopher Ayomikun’s eyes each time he called me by the name.”

“Well, that’s not your name. It is foul. Christopher has to know that. You don’t deserve it. No one deserves to be called such nonsense.” Abdul kicked at a stone; his feet moved more quickly. He seemed to be gulping air. After a while, he spoke again. “At least you know what they call you. Some of us, we don’t know the name of what we are. Even Ayomikun does not know yet what he is. The day he finds out, he will see that he is something much worse than he could ever imagine.”

Tomiwa tugged at a tall stalk overhanging the path. He wondered what Abdul meant by that. He wanted to ask for elaboration but Abdul was still speaking.

“Back then on campus, we had this roommate. A funny, generous chap like that. He walked swaying his hips. He had a high-pitched voice and if you were not careful while listening to him from a distance, you would conclude it was a girl speaking. He hardly ever spoke without twirling his fingers and making dramatic faces. We called him ‘Mr. Pepper’. He would cook and all of us would eat even more portions than he, the owner of the food, would eat. He always left his cupboard open. You could pick any food item you wanted from it. He always smiled and made us laugh by exaggerating his walk. He said the only reason he did that to create laughter was because we didn’t see him as mere entertainment. There was a time like that when people tried to talk him down because of his girliness. See eh. We all rose to defend him o. Very brilliant boy. Graduated with a first-class. And he was a musician, too. Would play this lovely black guitar on rainy nights.”

“Wow,” Tomiwa said, genuinely wowed. Hearing about somebody that was almost exactly like him felt like redemption itself.

“Yes. Wow.”

But Tomiwa wondered, “Corper Abdul.”

“Yes?”

“Would you have defended him like that if he had been stingy, dumb and unfriendly?”

Abdul cocked his head sideways and scratched it again. Then he confessed, “I’m not sure others would have defended him. They were like, ‘Who will now cook for us?’ But I would. I know would. I just liked him. No reason.”

Tomiwa plunged into questions. “So how did he end up? Was he your set? Where was he posted to?”

Abdul smiled, and Tomiwa thought he saw a hint of sadness in the smile.

“What, sir?” he asked.

“Ismail is dead.”

Tomiwa stopped walking. Abdul also stopped walking. The trees sighed.

“How… How did he die?” Getting those words out was like self-torturing.

“There are some things that can’t be explained to you now.” Abdul spoke briskly. He looked rueful, as if he thought he had said way too much.

Tomiwa gazed at the footpath. “Did he die because he was like me?”

Abdul slipped into silence, a long, long silence. Finally, he said, “You are not ripe to know some things, my dear. But one day, I promise, you will know.”

He looked like he wanted to add something, but they had got to the busy road, market and vehicular noises spoiling the air. And Tomiwa thought about all the times he had tried to drink up his mother’s kerosene or chew up her bar soaps, and how on each attempt his little brother’s face had flashed into his mind, thin and sallow, and he wondered just how much was left to know. Abdul waited and watched him cross to the other side and disappear into a corner.

* * *

After that afternoon, Christopher Ayomikun and his boys were locked into interminable counseling sessions with Abdul in the staff room, after school, repeatedly, and they no longer ambushed Tomiwa on the path homeward, nor harassed him as fiercely as before in school. After that afternoon, Abdul started sending him a flask of food every lunch break and, after closing, they walked the lonely path together and talked freely about all of Abdul’s past girlfriends and the current one who was in her final year at the Ogun State University and who visited Ijebu-Ode twice in a fortnight. But it was this first afternoon, this first walk, this first conversation, this day in October, that Tomiwa would always remember. The moment Abdul, a young man with no illicit intentions, held him by the hand and picked him up from the dust. He wondered what Abdul had seen. Abdul had certainly not seen just a boy who liked boys. He had not seen just a boy being bullied and who needed his help. He had not seen just a helpless boy. Abdul had seen a brother. A full human.

And from that episode, Tomiwa was strengthened. Elevated. Humanized and fortified. One day, it slipped out of his mouth, that famously awaited question of: “Where do you live in Lagos, sir?” And Abdul had hurriedly told him where, his lips stopping sooner than the words had come out, as if it had slipped out of him, too.

Months later, as the year wound down into December and the harmattan descended in all its cold and dryness, Tomiwa would still remember that day in October. He would see girls rubbing an extra sheen of gloss on their lips and think of the first time he had rubbed on lipstick. It was his mother’s. A purple shade. And it was, like this, Christmastime. His mother had seen it on him, and he had wondered what she was going to do to him. But she had merely laughed and asked him not to use that shade of lipstick anymore because it didn’t suit his skin color. He had been surprised, but his surprise had been faint and fibreless; his mother had always regarded his difference with the calmness of a wise silence. She had never judged him, never reacted to his authentic being with the horror of other people. He would take this memory, this lack of horror, and with it go and visit Abdul in his home in Lagos to spend Christmas. Abdul, shocked to see him, would ask him—How!—and Tomiwa would laugh a belly laugh and slump against him in the weakness of that laughter and tell him that he had lied to his parents and brother that he wanted to spend Christmas with his maternal aunt in Lagos, a staunch Deeper Lifer who detested phones and communicated only by letters. And Abdul would laugh deeply, shoulders shaking, and smack the boy’s head and call him, “Omo kata”—mischievous child—and welcome him “into my humble abode”. Tomiwa would look around the sizable room, the walls bare of photographs, the air full of a distinctly single scent, and would wonder about asking whether Abdul lived alone and his girlfriend now visited him often, whether she lived in Lagos as well. Then he would look at Abdul in his singlet, his broad chest tapering down to a small, dimpled waist, his muscles stepping out more obviously than they did in his NYSC shirt, and decide not to ask anything at all.

Abdul would cook spaghetti and fried eggs, which Tomiwa would find delightfully delicious, and they would sit on the mattress and eat it together. Over the meal, while the street children fired their bangers past the open window, they would remember Christopher Ayomikun and the rest of the class, and cackle away into the night. After many hours of talking and laughing and yawning, while in bed with him, Tomiwa would think of sleeping and facing him. He would imagine Abdul breathing into his face. He would shut his eyes and savor the sensation. After a while, he would open them and lie in the opposite direction of the bed, so that his face nestled close to Abdul’s warm feet. Abdul’s feet were always warm. Abdul would stir awake, look at him and give a faint smile of reassurance. In that smile was You are safe with me.Tomiwa would marvel, once again, at this unshifting openness. He would wrap an arm gratefully around Abdul’s right foot and hold it close to his cheek.

And sleep happily into Christmas morning.

From the writer

:: Account ::

HISTORY: There is homophobia in Nigeria and there are severe cases of queer people—especially the young—getting bullied, dispossessed and, in extreme situations, killed. It is criminal to be homosexual or bisexual in Nigeria. Most queer people cannot come out to their loved ones as who they really are. And it is harder for children whose sexual orientation is already assumed because of how they present, for instance, effeminacy. Such kids are often lonely and misunderstood, and it takes only a miracle to find a friend out there.

SKETCH: I drew out this story around a situation I had in early secondary school (or what is called “high school”). I was bullied by schoolmates who thought my effeminacy was an excuse for them to ridicule and malign me. To further satirize homophobic slurs and attacks, I thickened the main character with other nuances going on in his life that contribute to his disillusionment in human kindness. I deliberately sketched it around a rare friendship curve, an avuncular guidance that is highly controversial especially in a world still uncomfortable with, and ignorant about, homosexuality. But the older man in this story is straight and not abusive; I only wanted to show the grittiness of an asexual puppy crush.

MARKER: I set the story in Nigeria, where homophobia and the bullying of effeminate men still rage on. But it is such a universally relevant conflict that I have had most of my foreign beta readers say they could relate to every emotion. I set it in the years preceding the passing of the anti-gay law by the Nigerian goverment (meaning the years before 2014). I did this to minimize the excessive horror value of the story. I wrote the story using a third-person point of view, ostensibly to make the reader watch with a safe detachment but actually to magnify the sheer horror of bullying and loneliness. The only grave triggers in the story are homophobic slurs used by the antagonists. The rest is a beautiful story of friendship and redemption. I did my best to use plain English throughout.

REPOSITORY OF INFLUENCES: I did not use extensive materials for research for this story. All I had to do was take a look into my own early teenage, the struggles as an effeminate Nigerian child, my experiences. The story is also heavily influenced by my deep, eager hunger to see some justice happen to the lonely, bruised queer child out there. I hope the story gives some kind of light to someone out there.

Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya was born and raised in Nigeria. He is the first-place winner of the 2022 Arts Lounge Intercontinental Literary Award for Non-fiction, first-place winner of the 2022 international Itanile Story Award, a major finalist for the 2018 National GTB Dusty Manuscript New Novelist Award, and a top finalist for the 2023 AfritondoShort Story Prize. He is twenty-eight years old and the author of “How to Catch a Story That Doesn’t Exist”, a collection of queer stories published in 2022. He lives in Nigeria. He tweets at @OsumareAyomi.

Houses in the Sky

Fiction / Nicola Koh

:: Houses in the Sky ::

Okay, sure, fourteen’s a bit old to be building treehouses. But a) I’d never had one and Sally Long said I’d been deprived, and b) this wasn’t going to be just a few rotting planks nailed to a branch, this was going to be the best goddamn treehouse east of the Mississippi. After all, our parents were architects at the best firm in Minnesota, and we researched for months, trading design ideas and learning to sketch.

It was codenamed Operation House in the Sky and kept strictly classified. It was going to take a lot to convince said parents; specifically, my mother.

The Maternally Oriented Parental Unit came from Malaysia, a country where kids apparently had no rights. There were zero discussion about eight pm curfews, the two hours a week allotted for video games (pending good behavior), or the list of chores which could have taken a whole toilet paper role. We got top grades and won awards, or else. Any sniff of dissidence resulted in hours-long lectures on ingratitude, selfishness, and my-house-my-rules.

When I’d point out my mother never pushed her subordinates half this hard, she’d say, “With them, there’s too much to fix. You’re like a pot with only a few cracks, so of course I want to fix the ones that are there.

Sally thought the best time for me to bring up H.I.T.S was around my birthday in late July, when she’d be more amenable to requests. I said she’d just think it impertinent to ask a favor on the anniversary of the twenty-three hours it took to pop me out. It turned out to be moot either way when early in the month, the mother yelled at me and my brother to come to the living room. We assembled, exchanging the universal look for what the hell did you do this time.

My mother hated that living room: trapezoid with a ten-inch depression that provided less separation than a place to trip and a faux-marble fireplace with Greco columns designed presumably by someone who’d only watched Disney’s Hercules. When she summoned me and my brother there, it was almost certainly situation critical.

“You two are losing touch with your roots.”

Shit.

“We’re taking a trip back to Malaysia.”

Shit, shit, shit.

The H.I.T.S timetable was officially in tatters. For that matter, so was summer. Hell, my life might be at risk—no exaggeration. I’ve been chased by packs of monkeys, twice, and the last visit I’d spent three days in the hospital with food poisoning where the nurses poked me five times looking for a vein. We were also warned to be careful to wear our bags away from the street because people on motorcycles might snatch it while you were walking.

Even sans outright tragedy, the prognosis was grim. Flights so long we’d be at genuine risk of deep vein thrombosis. Days of shitty-long jetlag, the first in the middle of an eight-hour-minimum welcome by the family (which for Eurasians means cousins, aunts, uncles, second cousins, and sometimes dentists), where we’ll be constantly told we look tired and should get some rest, but won’t actually be allowed to, and receive the multiple verdicts on whether we needed to eat more or less. Then it’s sweating nonstop for weeks while eating gameshow-weird food and visiting one site after another full of great cultural relevance and nothing actually interesting. Not to mention at least ten giant family dinners and the days-long marathon of goodbyes.

But Sally’s voice floated into my head. Lose the battle, win the war. She’d said that when the mother vetoed an Ariana Grande concert in May and again when I was forbidden from piercing my ears. It was attributed to Sun Tzu the first time and Aristotle the second, but it was almost certainly from a meme. It did make sense, though, not that I’d tell her. So I just nodded and asked when we were going and what I should pack. My father and brother may have stared like I’d gone certifiable, but my mother’s lips curled ever so slightly in surprise.

Three cultural-horizons-broadening expeditions in, however, I was starting to wonder if the war was really worth it. By the fifth, I was ready to dump Sally in one of the many muddy rivers, preferably one especially full of snakes and eels.

The trip in question was a visit to my mother’s childhood home in some railroad village a thousand miles from modernity. Everything smelled like mud and cow dung and was surrounded by sprawling bushes and trees with leaves so green they shone. My mother didn’t know who was living there in her old house, so we just walked around it. It was barely more than a hut raised on concrete stilts in a dirt clearing.

“Don’t get too close, cobras like to nest under these houses,” she said, like it was a perfectly normal thing to say.

There were two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, with a table out back on a slab of concrete serving as a dining room, sheltered by walls and a roof made of rusting tin sheet. My mother often told us how my grandmother favoured my uncle. She’d make her and my aunty mop while he sat and read the newspaper, only moving to raise his legs for them to get under him. She especially brought this up when we complained about our hours-long sets of chores. She’d never mentioned how little there was to mop.

“How come the government didn’t let Grandad have a better house?” my brother asked.

My mother shrugged. “He was just a railroad conductor. They didn’t get paid much. He would fight with Grandma a lot because she was careless with the money.”

In a house that small, where did you hide from yelling?

“Can we go?” I asked.

“Look at those vents,” my mother said, pointing to slits about three-quarters of the way up the house. “Such a simple and efficient way to keep a house cool.”

My mother loved shit like that. She paid her way through college and then got a full ride to Cornell for her Masters in Architecture. After my father joined her in Minnesota, people often asked him how he could leave his home and family to be with a new wife.

He’d say, “Have you met her?” My mother’s will is tsunamic.

It was hours before we finally got back to my aunty’s house in Kuala Lumpur. I flopped on the bed, got out my iPad, and Facetimed Sally. “How’s civilization?”

Sally snorted. “It’s not like you’re living in the jungle.”

“It’s probably less sweltering in the jungle,” I said, jabbing at the temperature button for the A.C. “My parents tried to make me eat chicken feet.”

“Ew,” Sally said.

“They already made me eat the fish head curry.”

“Fish head??”

“It was huge, too. I tried to make it talk, but my mother told me not to ‘act the child’.”

“You should have taken a picture.”

I snorted. “With what? They gave me a flip phone to use.”

“Oh, gross. That’s worse than chicken feet.” Sally sighed. “Still, I wish I was somewhere cool like Malaysia.”

“Trust me, cool it is not,” I said. “In any sense.”

The mother started yelling from downstairs.

“More familial obligations?” Sally asked.

I shrugged. “Probs screwed up the homework.”

“Homework?” Sally said. “Gabby. You’re. On. Vacation.”

“Tell that to Drill Sargeant Chili Padi,” I said. “We’re writing reports on Malaysian life.”

“Good lordy, have fun with that,” Sally said. “And keep buttering up your mother.”

“I still say we just plant a tree in your yard. It’ll be faster.”

The mother’s yells were growing louder and decidedly less patient.

“Get out of here,” Sally said and hung up.

Turned out the Portuguese colonized Melaka not Penang; Malaysia’s independence date was 1957, not some long-ass time ago; and the Dutch and British East India companies did not trade territories like Pokémon.

“Even your grammar is atrocious,” my mother said, whipping out one of the dozens of red pens she seemed to have sequestered in every bag, pocket, probably the linings of her clothes. After ten minutes, the pages were more red than black.

“You might as well rewrite it,” I noted.

“I’m not doing your work for you.”

“You did that auditorium project.”

Last Spring our class had taken part in a citywide contest to design a model auditorium.

“You know all the parents did it,” she muttered. “Especially Mr. Long.”

The last, at least, was true.

After another five minutes, I said, “Can we go to 1‑Utama again?”

“We didn’t come here to go to malls.”

“Did you know it’s twice the size of the Mall of America?”

“You looked that up, but you can’t spell Terengganu properly.”

“Maaaa.”

“No means no.”

Sally never had this problem. When I wasn’t allowed to watch Hunger Games until my mother vetted it, Sally told me drily that Mr. Long wouldn’t have cared if she’d watched Saw. When I was grounded for getting a B‑plus on midterms, she informed me airily she got thirty dollars for an A and twenty for a B.

“Do you get twenty-five for an A‑minus?” I asked.

She sniffed. “Daddy says minuses are just what teachers use to annoy their students.”

When I finally returned Stateside, Sally and I went to the Coney’s Cones roadside shack to get ice-cream.

“You have no idea how good this tastes,” I said.

“It’s just a regular old twist.”

“Malaysian ice-cream sucks,” I said. “Their cows must be deficient.”

“Aren’t Asians lactose intolerant?” Sally said. “Maybe that’s why you fart up a storm every time we come here.”

“I do not.”

“It’s the worst.”

I shoved her almost off the railing, but she steadied herself and stuck out a strawberry covered tongue.

“Also, how are you not the slightest bit darker?” she said.

“The mother made us wear buckets of sun tan lotion.”

“One day on the lake, and I still got burnt,” she said, turning her back to show me.

I traced the burn. “Ouch.”

“Also, we’re in trouble,” Sally said after a moment, strangely breathily.

“Hmm?”

“Our auditoriums made the finals.”

The burn was the shape of a bird, I decided. It tingled on the sticky tips of my fingers as if it were electric.

“So what do we do when our parents find out we chucked theirs?” Sally said eventually.

I shrugged. “Ours were better.”

Sally giggled. “Daddy’s was sooo boring. How is he even a real architect?”

“The bigger thing to worry about is H.I.T.S.”

“You’ve got to talk to your mom. Today.”

“Dude, I just got back.”

“To. Day.” Sally turned around and wiped my cheek. “You’re such a slob.”

She jumped down from the railing. At the traffic light, she turned to salute me. When she disappeared around the corner, I touched the place where she’d smeared ice-cream on my cheek.

At nine-thirty, I found my mother folding clothes in the kitchen. “Hey, Ma?”

“What?” my mother said, not looking up.

“Can Sally and I build a treehouse in the oak?”

She stared at me. “Are you monkeys? Decent people live on the ground.”

“It’s basically a requisite for a suburban American childhood.”

“If Americans walked on their hands, would you do it too?”

I chose not to point out that I was, de facto, American. “We’d make it really cool.”

She huffed. “Everything with the Americans is cool this, cool that.”

“I mean sophisticated,” I said. “Like a model house. All our own design.”

My mother paused with a t‑shirt in her hand. For all the sermons on gratitude, I knew she hated our house. The layout wasted space, it couldn’t hold heat for shit, the walls were paper thin, and the exterior was a 50s cookie cutter suburban style that was outdated before the houses were finished. And the living room: the way she glared at it when she thought I wasn’t looking.

“It could be the best treehouse in the Midwest. They’d probably talk about it on MPR.”

“Why must everything in this country be best, greatest, most,” she muttered.

But I could see it working behind her eyes. After folding a pair of jeans and two shirts, she said, “I’ll think about it.”

The next morning, I patiently chased corn flakes around my bowl until they started to break while my mother was on the phone for almost an hour. When she sat down and started buttering slices of toast with infuriatingly careful strokes, still I kept graveyard quiet.

“About this treehouse,” she said, finally.

“Hmm,” I said with a nonchalance I definitely hadn’t practiced for an hour.

“We can build it.”

“Oh, cool.”

I washed my bowl with agonizing deliberateness, then went to fetch our design. It was a thing of beauty, printed with actual blueprint on professional 36-by-24 inch sheet, diagrams and extensive notes.

“What is this?” my mother said. She looked at it for a second, then frowned. “No, that won’t work.”

She flipped it over and started sketching. It looked nothing like our design.

My throat clenched. “Why not?”

“Too complicated to explain.”

“Can we at least try?” I asked.

“Why set yourself up for failure?” my mother muttered.

I realized then our fatal error. We’d been so focused on the need to convince my mother to build the treehouse, we forgot we had to also convince her to let us build the damn thing.

And just like that it was all in smoke. H.I.T.S mission report: failure.

My mother went through four drafts and ten revisions to her final design. Twice we had to build the imposter treehouse then tear it down because of some trivial flaw or another.

“Still working on that?” Sally asked, nodding at the bones of the latest attempt.

We were sitting on the lawn, which was growing unruly because no one had time to mow it. I plucked dandelions and blew their spores out.

“We’ll probably be going at the stupid thing until the zombie apocalypse.”.

“At least you’ll have a place to hide. Daddy refuses to build a bunker.”

“You can chill with us,” I said. “My brother will want to fight the zombies anyway.”

She started making a chain of dandelion stems. “I don’t know. Your mom would get on my case about how I shoot them.”

“Right between the eyes. Or no dessert.”

“She’d even nag the zombies,” Sally said. Her voice went low and staccato. “Backs straight! Stop limping! Chew the brains before swallowing!”

I fell over laughing. “Oh my god, don’t let her hear you,” I wheezed. “I’ll be grounded for a year.”

“You got spores,” Sally said when I got up. She started combing my hair.

My spine shivered. “At least it adds color.”

“Dude, your hair’s gorgeous. It’s so black and shiny.”

“But you have the best hair,” I said.

Sally fingered one of her locks, so pale it snatched the reds of the setting sun.

“Yours is better,” she said.

I started to protest, but Sally pointed to the treehouse. “Your mom’s calling.”

“What, Ma?” I shouted.

“Come hand me the level,” my mother yelled.

“Give me a minute.”

“Now.”

Sally looped the dandelion necklace over my head.

“You’d better go. Gotta finish that thing before the zombies get here,” she said, winking as she got up.

“Gabrielle!”

“O.K, Ma!”

When I brought her the level, my mother looked at me quizzically. “What are you wearing?”

“Nothing,” I said.

I tried to take the necklace off gently, but it broke.

It was two more months before the mother was satisfied. Two half-levels, a sloped roof, gently polished wood. And as much as I hated to admit, it was a virtuoso in American traditional minimalism.

Sally and I volunteered to be the trial monkeys. She said she was only coming along to indulge me, but I could tell she was just as giddy. Surrounded by all that red and amber and gold, it was like being cocooned by fire.

“I don’t know why more people don’t sleep in trees in the Fall,” I said.

“Because it’s freezing?” Sally said. “How are you only wearing one sweater?”

“It’s not that bad. Must be my tropical blood.”

“You’ve been to Malaysia like what, four times?”

“Blood doesn’t forget,” I said, solemnly. “Or so the mother claims.”

“I’ll never understand her,” she said. “No wonder you’re so weird.”

“Says the girl who eats everything in her sandwich one-by-one.”

“It tastes better that way,” she said. “Also, we should be taking pictures.”

“Why live life through a camera?”

“Wow, now you’re even sounding like her,” Sally said. “And the point of pictures is to make others jealous?”

She busied herself choosing the right filter and caption. “You see the way Carl’s been looking at you?” she said, peering at me from the corner of her eyes.

I shrugged “He’s got the yellow fever bad.”

“I mean three Asian girls in a row. But he is on the basketball team.”

“That’s because he’s already six feet. He can barely toss a ball into a canyon.”

Sally snorted. “So you’re not interested in him?”

“No dating until I’m out of college with a job, remember,” I said. “Preferably with a doctorate or two.”

Sally snorted. “Yeah, but if you could date him, would you?”

“No.”

Sally nodded. “Yeah, I wouldn’t date him either.”

There seemed to be an emphasis on him. My stomach clenched unpleasantly

Around eight, my mother came by to tell us to go to sleep.

“Oooh, bedtime for the baby?” Sally giggled until I shoved her over.

We got out our sleeping bags. “This thing smells like hot dogs,” I said.

“Tell your mom not to shop at Goodwill,” Sally said.

We talked for barely ten minutes before Sally fell into incoherence. But I couldn’t get myself to sleep. My breaths misted above me, but I somehow felt uncomfortably warm, like there was a heat gnawing through my chest. I wrestled my way out of the sleeping bag.

Sally’s face was a pale glow, cheeks trembling with every snore.

I nudged her awake.

“Move over,” I mumbled.

I crawled in and settled on my side, face-to-face with her, the bag squeezing us tight enough that our breasts just barely shifted against each other with every breath. When I opened my eyes, hers were fixed on me, almost emerald in the dark.

“Hi,” Sally said. Her voice was quavering.

It felt like hours before I leaned closer. I could smell the garlic from spaghetti dinner on her breath.

The only time I’d ever kissed someone it was rough and wet and gross. Some cousin of a girl from school at spin the bottle. I left the game making a face.

These kisses were rough, and wet, and beautiful.

In the morning, after we’d dropped Sally off, my mother asked, “Did something happen last night?”

“No,” I said.

“I’ve never heard you two be so quiet.”

“Why do you always have to interrogate me?” I said, foolishly.

She pulled over. “You’re hiding something, and I do not like it.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Gabrielle.”

“Oh my god. We kissed, okay?”

“Oh,” my mother said, starting the car again. “I was worried it was drugs.”

I couldn’t believe it. I texted Sally—my mom guessed and shes not flipping?

—holy shit. maybe the zombies got her

I started plastering the reply box with laughing emojis.

“Of course, you can’t date.”

The words didn’t register for a moment. “What?”

“You know the rule, no dating till after college.”

My blood turned ice even as my skull felt like it was on fire. “That’s bullshit.”

“Watch your language.”

When we got back home, I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I was so numb. I stared at the line of laughing faces on the unsent text, then deleted them one by one.

The next day, Sally found me at my locker. When she leaned into me, I backed away.

Sally flinched. “What the hell?”

“It’s…” I said. “I mean…”

Sally bit the corner of her lip. “It’s your mother isn’t it.”

I couldn’t look at her.

“Oh my god, Gabby, stand up to her for once in your life!”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t,” Sally said. “It’s the twenty-first fucking century. What kind of fascist bans a teenager from dating?”

My head snapped up. “Look, I’m sorry my mother isn’t some pushover you can bat your eyes at and get whatever the hell you want!”

Sally blinked slowly, like a lizard. “My dad’s not a pushover. He’s just not certifiable.”

“My mother only wants what’s best for me.”

“That umbilical cord looks real good on you,” she said, turning to leave.

“God help us all if you don’t get your way for once!”

Sally stiffened, then kept walking.

The silence between our two desks started to grow thicker than smog, then spread through the whole classroom as everyone nervously gauged the situation. Halfway through Wednesday, Ms. Walker asked Sally to switch to a different desk. She moved without a word.

If school was a cold war, home was full nuclear. My mother and I screamed our throats ragged as the battlefronts multiplied. My ridiculous extra homework. How Americanized I was. How many times I’d been grounded for missing a smudge of dust. How, when people at church asked me how I was, I would respond, “You know, just surviving the slavemaster. Wa-pish.”

When I called her a bitch, my mother’s eyes widened far enough for her eyeballs to roll out. Passing my brother’s room on the way to storming to mine, he was cowering on his bed.
“What the hell are you looking at?” I snapped.

The only time my mother and I paused hostilities was when my father gingerly brought up family therapy, and we concurrently let him know our shared pieces of mind.

Meanwhile at school, I’d taken to wearing gobs of concealer so no one could tell how much I was crying. I laughed loudly at the weakest jokes. Sally still wouldn’t look at me.

When my mother confronted me about my plummeting grades, something broke.

“I hate you,” I said.

Her head snapped back, like she’d been electrocuted. “What?” she stammered.

“You’ve ruined my life.” My voice was as monotonous as an answering machine. Press “1” for How Gabby Really Feels. “I. Fucking. Hate you.”

When I passed my parent’s bedroom that night, my mother was sobbing on my father’s shoulder. He was pleading silently for me to say something. I rolled my eyes and went to bed.

Then a few days later, at lunch in the cafeteria, an announcement on the P.A from Vice-Principal Colne. Our model auditoriums had won prizes for the city competition. My chest clenched. Building those with Sally felt like an episode from some show we’d watched obsessively then abruptly forgot about.

“Our own Sally Long’s placed third, and Gabrielle Delima placed second!”

I glanced at Sally, two tables away, but she didn’t turn around.

“Please give them a big round of applause.”

The cafeteria clapped awkwardly. Sally’s voice sliced through the silence that followed.

“It’s because she’s Asian,” she was saying. “Affirmative Action bullshit.”

A meatball sailed through the air and splattered on the back of her head. It took me a moment to realize I’d been the one who’d thrown it. Sally whipped around just in time for marinara sauce to explode all over her face.

“Don’t you dare talk about me that way!” I screamed.

Sally grabbed a glob of spaghetti and hurled it back. Sally, perfect in every way but this: the noodles missed me by a mile and struck the theater kids.

“It’s called free speech!” she screamed. “Look it up!”

Anything else she might have said was lost in the ensuing maelstrom of food. We stood unmoving through it all even as pieces of boiled broccoli and disintegrating meatballs splattered on us, and milk and pop soaked our clothes. Neither of us would be the one to look away as fury redoubled between our eyes like microphone feedback.

“What the hell was that?” Vice-Principal Colne said, ninety minutes later, furiously dabbing an orangey grease spot on his shirt.

“She started it,” Sally said.

“She insulted me,” I shot back.

“I don’t care,” Colne said. “Who started what. Who said what. Detention, two weeks.”

He silenced our protest with a slash of his hand, then gestured toward the door. Mrs. Long and my mother walked in. They sat on either side of us, avoiding our eyes as they gave the standard words of contrition and promises of good behavior.

“Now apologize,” Colne said to us.

“Sorry,” we muttered.

“Not to me,” Colne said. “To one another.”

Sally froze too.

“Look at each other,” he said.

It was the first time in weeks that I’d been this close to her. I’d forgotten how green her eyes were. Concealer was flaking beneath them.

“Sorry.”

I was surprised how much it sounded like we meant it.

Sally looked away. “Good aim. You should tryout for softball.”

My lip twitched. “Maybe if they got better uniforms.”

When we got home, I started toward my bedroom.

“Wait,” my mother said.

“Can I at least take a nap?” I said.

“Please?” she said softly.

I froze mid-step. I couldn’t remember my mother ever saying that to me. When she collapsed into the sofa in the living room, I approached warily and sat down on the arm on the opposite side.

“I wanted to nurture you. Protect you. Push you,” my mother said. Her eyes were spider-webbed with blood lines. “I thought that’s what a mother is supposed to do.”

She leaned forward, staring at the fireplace, clasping her hands on her knees, as if praying. “Growing up, I felt so alone. Grandpa was always gone for work and Grandma barely paid attention to me.” She looked at me again. “I never wanted you to feel that way.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I just want you to understand. I get so caught up in it. You and your brother are my joys. You’re the best things I ever made.”

“Destroyed, more like.”

“Sometimes I want to shield you so much I forget you have to breathe,” she said. “But I’m trying, Gabrielle. I’m trying to be better.”

I stood up. “Too late.”

In my bedroom, I looked up Sally’s Instagram. Only five pictures down, there we were, in the treehouse, Sally grinning like it was her birthday and me looking like someone who hadn’t quite figured out smiling. The caption said: #BFFs <3

I texted Sally. —can I call?

A minute later the phone buzzed. —yeah

“Hey,” she said. “How much trouble you in?”

“Not sure. The mother bot didn’t even yell at me. Must be out of juice.”

“Mine went full soap opera. What are people going to think about us?”

I giggled. “I miss you.”

“Me too.”

“I want to be with you. No matter what my mother says.”

There was silence on the other line.

“Sally?”

“It’s just…” Sally said. “I don’t know. You really hurt me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We hurt each other.”

“Yeah,” Sally said.

After a minute I said, “You still there?”

She exhaled. “My dad’s taking a position in Chicago.”

My throat shrank. I could barely whisper an oh.

“Yeah,” she said. She paused for a minute. Her breaths came soft and shallow. “Maybe it’s best… Maybe we just shouldn’t let anything happen.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll…” Sally said, “See you around, I guess.”

I didn’t let the phone drop from my ear even when the two beeps of the hang-up tone came, like the last beats of a heart.

Anytime now she’ll call back and say it was a mistake. We were BFFs.

The snow-coated roof of the treehouse turned gray, then red, then a bruised purple. Best friends forever. She had to call back.

How could forever end like this?

The treehouse was glowing in streetlight amber when my mother came to sit on the edge of the bed.

“You win,” I said. “Control my life all you want. I don’t care. Nothing matters anymore. Not a single goddam thing.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

It took me a moment to comprehend what she’d said. That impossible word had pulled some kind of plug in me, and the rage building in my chest drained in a rush.

“I’m going to make dinner,” my mother said. “I’ll leave some in the fridge.”

It was past midnight when I finally crawled out of bed. My mother was working at the dining table.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“We’re redistributing Mr. Long’s remaining projects.”

“Oh,” I said, sitting down. The treehouse looked gray and dead. I tried to picture the red and gold of that autumn day back onto it, but I couldn’t. I started crying. Her lips had been so warm.

“That damn treehouse,” my mother said suddenly.

“Huh?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“It’s crooked.”

“Doesn’t look it,” I said.

“A serious structural flaw.” She sighed. “Too complicated to explain. We will have to tear it down.”

She glanced at me as she said it. “Ah,” I said. “Guess so.”

The next day, wrapped in a dozen blankets, we shivered in front of the fireplace, our coats pooling water by the door, neither of us saying anything. Whenever the fire started to fade, I grabbed another piece of the treehouse and shoved it into the flames. Each piece glowed brighter and brighter, then crumbled. Like a promise, like a dream.

From the writer

:: Account ::

The germ of this story was the phrase start over bouncing around my head which had me wondering what kind of story would revolve around that. It was while taking my first MFA class, almost a decade ago, taught by the inestimably brilliant and nurturing Deborah Keenan, who provided more prompts in a class than you could work through in a year, so many that I was now making one up on my own. And maybe it was because, while severely depressed and on an ill-fated journey with hormone replacement therapy, I found myself exorcising demons around my relationship with my mother, but the story I immediately fell into was about dealing with a perfectionist father who kept scrapping anything his kids did that wasn’t up to standards and telling them to start over.

But as much as the heart of the story was drawn from my own life, the details weren’t. And in a way it probably felt like when a friend tells a story that you suspect has all the important bits obscured.

Someone once told me that writers have to ask themselves: where’s their skin in the game? Because there are some stories you can’t tell by wading in the shallows. So the generic Asian father became a Malaysian Eurasian mother, the trip to Malaysia was stuffed with details that could be autobiographic, and the conflict between parent and child became the embodiment of all the anger and hurt that I felt growing up. What remained fictional, such as growing up in the U.S. for example, did so as a vehicle for the story, not a way to hide.

One mysterious thing is how I masked my mother at a time when our relationship was strained. But in the months that followed, maybe after having gotten all that out in that class, I found myself able to move past the hurt she caused by her mistakes to appreciate the love that was behind it, and somehow freer to be honest about the hard truths of our relationship. In the original, the ending involves Sally dying and Gabby’s father dismantling the treehouse and asking if they can start over with the plans the girls made, perhaps some kind of wish fulfillment on my part. The new ending feels a lot closer to the nature of my own acceptance of my mother.

And maybe that’s a lesson: art imitates life, but sometimes as writers we have to let it.

Nicola Koh is a Malaysian Eurasian 16 years in the American Midwest, an atheist who lost their faith while completing their Masters of Theology, and a minor god of Tetris. They got their MFA from Hamline University and were a 2018 VONA/Voices and 2019/20 Loft Mentors Series fellow. Their fiction has appeared in places like the Margins, Brown Orient, and A‑Minor Magazine. Amongst other things, they enjoy taking too many pictures of their animal frenemies, crafting puns, and listening to public domain audio books after injuring their neck reading (which feels like some kind of literary wound of honour). See more at nicolakoh.com.

Oblation

Fiction / Wayne Mok

:: Oblation ::

I would often dream about John Calvin. That might be a weird thing to dream about, but I had just returned from seminary abroad after finishing a thesis on John Calvin’s Christology. In my dreams, I would see him standing behind the pulpit of the church in Geneva, arms high, nose in the Bible, preaching to a crowded room of people transfixed on him. He wasn’t a tall man, but there was a sense of urgency, almost anxiety, in the tone of his guttural voice. In those dreams, I would be in the front pew looking up, taking in every last word that came out of his mouth like I was sipping on pure water from an ancient spring. Occasionally, the dream would turn into a nightmare. One moment, I’d be sitting in the front pew, but the next, I’d feel out of place, conscious that I didn’t belong—my black hair, yellow skin, flat nose, Asian eyes—and I’d be dragged out of the church by the congregation, thrown out onto the street. Calvin himself would close the church doors, saying something to me in a language he knew I did not understand. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, I couldn’t help but be disturbed by what it might’ve meant.

The thesis on Calvin won the Bavinck Prize that year. The panel praised the piece and especially applauded the application I drew out for the church and social justice. One professor said he would talk to an editor he knew to see if they would be interested in it. The same week the prize was announced, the vicar from my church in Hong Kong called. He heard the news and asked if I was interested in a job. He was planning to retire in a few years and was looking for someone who could replace him then. It seemed like a sign from God and I accepted the position on the spot.

I first encountered the homeless man a few months after I returned to Hong Kong. The Christmas Eve service just ended. I had preached on the birth narrative in the Gospel of Luke and talked about Calvin’s concept of the accommodation of God; it was my best sermon yet. At the end of the service, a member of the congregation came up and said that he saw Jesus descending into the sanctuary as I was preaching.

As a yearly tradition, the church gave out gifts to everyone who attended the service. The box was wrapped with a festive print of baby Jesus in the manger. Inside was a mug with a Bible verse printed on it. On my way out, the vicar handed me one with a sly smirk on his face, “We need to get rid of these—the sexton needs space in the storeroom for the new nativity scene.”

I took it.

“Want another?”

I shook my head, “I don’t know what I’d do with it.”

The night sky was bright, illuminated by the lights of Hong Kong pushing against the darkness long forgotten. A large crowd streamed past the church towards the MTR Station on their way to the festivities that would run late into the night. I straightened my clerical collar and headed towards home.

Halfway across a deserted footbridge on my usual route home, I saw him. A pair of feet with frayed socks stuck out from underneath a flattened cardboard box. A damp T‑shirt was draped over the railing. As I walked closer, I was struck by a sour stench—like that of urine mixed with beer. I covered my nose. An empty takeout box lay open revealing a used pair of chopsticks, some chewed up meat, and a few toothpicks. The man’s head rested on a pair of old shoes.

My initial instinct was to walk past the man, but as he twisted and turned under his cardboard box, trying to find his way into sleep, I felt something. It was difficult to name it at the time, but I deduced it was probably something like compassion, or charity, or maybe even love. It was Christmas after all.

I tip toed over, bent down, and lay the gift next to his feet, careful not to touch him. Just before walking down the steps at the end of the bridge, I looked back. The neatly wrapped gift stood in stark contrast to the filth that covered everything about the man. The Apostle Paul had once said, “A man reap what he sows,” and I couldn’t help but wonder what the man did in the past to deserve his present life. The roar of the street and the chatter of the crowd below was almost deafening. A tram passed by underneath with Christmas carols blasting on its speakers.

That night, I had a nightmare. I was sitting in the church at Geneva in my cassock, manuscript in my hands, ready to preach on the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew. At some point during the first hymn, I looked down at my manuscript and realized that it was all in Latin—I didn’t read Latin. The next moment, the pulpit was empty and the congregation, including Calvin himself were all looking in my direction. I started to panic. An uncomfortable heat rose within my chest and ascended into my neck. My cheeks took on a red flush, my hands started to tremble, and my abdomen tightened. I managed to stand up and proceeded to walk towards the pulpit, but before I arrived, someone was already there. I couldn’t make out his face, but I somehow knew exactly who it was—it was the homeless man. He wore the same damp T‑shirt and pair of old socks that I saw on the bridge.

The man then opened his mouth to preach in Latin, with a voice far deeper and more forceful than that of Calvin’s, “Beati pauperes spiritu quoniam …” As his deafening voice echoed throughout the church, I felt an urge to run. I gathered my strength and ran down the center aisle towards the exit, but just before I could reach the doors, I felt my abdomen and groin give way. I woke up drenched in sweat. I pulled off my blanket and got out of bed, but my pants were so wet it felt like I just got out of the pool. Half-conscious, I stood there trying to figure out what had happened before I caught a whiff of an odor and glanced at my bed—I had peed my pants.

As I was in the shower cleaning myself off, I thought about the dream and what just happened—was God angry that I gave the homeless man a cheap gift? Was there something spiritual going on with the man—demonic possession? Did he need my help? Was God speaking to me? I had no clue, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew I needed to visit him again. I needed to find out. I put on a set of freshly ironed clerical clothes and went to see the man, with a hunch that the visit would make things right, somehow.

He was sitting on his cardboard box, cross-legged, sipping on a bottle of beer while eating a steamed pork bun. A Chinese man with a big face, dark skinned with unkempt greasy hair, he was dressed in the same reddish-brown T‑shirt, cargo shorts, with a different pair of socks this time, but the same horrid stench. The mug from the church was at his side, full of cigarette butts emitting a constant stream of smoke like incense in a censer. The Bible verse printed on it felt oddly out of place.

I pointed at the mug, “I left that there for you.”

He turned his head, “What?”

“It was a gift.”

He looked at it, before taking a sip of his beer. “What about it? You want it back?”

“No, but you shouldn’t be using it for cigarettes.”

He shook his head and downed the rest of his beer. In a swift motion, he whacked the mug with the empty beer bottle. The mug skidded on the concrete floor before hitting a metal rail. Upon impact, the mug shattered into pieces, sending cigarette butts flying across the rest of the bridge.

“Get lost,” he yelled.

Stunned by his response, I ran as fast as I could in my cassock to the other side of the bridge and felt a shard of the broken mug crack beneath my foot.

At staff meeting later in the week, I shared about the man. The vicar nodded in approval. “It is our calling as ministers to represent Christ to the poor,” he said, sipping instant coffee from another Christmas mug. Though his comment affirmed my intuition that I did the right thing, the more I thought about the man, the more disgusted I felt—the way the man dressed, the way he spoke, his lack of manners and respect, not just for me, but for God, even his stink. I knew that it was wrong to not help someone in need, but I couldn’t help but think the man didn’t want my help, in which case, there probably wasn’t any reason to visit him again.

In the following weeks, mirages, or perhaps you can call them visions, of the man, began to appear wherever I would go. He would be outside the supermarket begging for loose change. He would be sprawled out on the bottom deck of the tram. He would be smoking in the park, loudly commenting on the play of casual football teams. These visions became more and more frequent, and I kept trying to ignore them, until one day after work as I was leaving the church, I had a vision of him there at the front of the chapel, inebriated, lounging by the altar, burping after taking a swig of wine out of the chalice. God was surely saying something, like he spoke to Samuel in the night. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew that the only way to find out was to see the man again.

The man was there lying on flattened boxes. A blanket was pushed to the side, soaking up runoff from the railings. A broken umbrella faced the street, shielding off the mild rain. Neon signs illuminating the bridge gave the night a reddish-green glow. His stink seemed to be intensified by the humidity, making each breath that much harder to bear.

He sat up and wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt, “What do you want?”

I pointed towards the church, “I’m a minister there. I want to help.”

He ignored me and reached for a pack of cigarettes.

I pulled out a paper bag from my briefcase and put it on the ground in front of him. He took the bag, pulled out a bottle of water, and then a chicken avocado sourdough sandwich I picked up from an expensive sandwich place down the street. He held the sandwich close to his face, and then sniffed it, like an animal.

“I don’t eat gweilo food,” he said, setting it down on the floor.

“Sir,” I said, trying my best to convey respect, “I’m trying to help.”

He shook his head and chuckled, “I know your type; you don’t want to help.” He tossed the sandwich at my feet. “You know what will help? Tsing Tao, cigarettes, fried rice …” he paused for a moment, “and a Mark Six ticket.” He roared with laughter and proceeded to pick up the water bottle, “I’ll take this though.” I walked away, annoyed at the man, and if I was being honest, at God.

That week, the mild rain strengthened into a typhoon. Streets started to flood and there were landslides in rural areas. Schools were closed, work halted, people stayed home. The news reported that it was the strongest typhoon recorded in half a century. Perhaps it was cabin fever, but a week into the storm, my apartment began to smell like the homeless man. That same nasty stink. At first, I thought it was a clogged drain or a plumbing issue caused by the rain. I plumbed the toilets, snaked every drain, checked for leaks, but to no avail. I took out the trash, cleaned out the fridge. I spent the rest of the day cleaning and sanitizing the entire apartment—I vacuumed and mopped, wiped down every surface, cleaned the mold out of the grout in the bathroom, scrubbed the kitchen down along with all the grime from the past year. I even threw out anything remotely close to old into large garbage bags and resealed my windows and doors to ensure nothing could get in. Still, the scent lingered. It was as if his presence infiltrated every corner of the apartment, not wanting to leave.

That night, exhausted from the cleaning, I fell into a deep sleep. It was the same dream. I was sitting in the first row of the chapel as usual, listening to Calvin as he preached, but this time, Theodore Beza, John Knox, and younger theologians like Charles Hodge and Abraham Kuyper were there was well. The greats. Conscious of their presence, I was nervous, but also excited about being there, when the stench hit me. That God-awful stench. I looked around. Other people smelled it too. People pulled out handkerchiefs and covered their faces; others tried to fan the smell away with their hands. The stench continued to intensify. An older member of the church fainted in her seat, and moments later, a young child vomited on a pew. A few people in the back tried to open the doors, but they were locked. No one could get out. The crowd started to rush towards the door, ramming themselves against it, trying to break the lock. The church Fathers stood in horror at what was going on, bewildered at the situation.

I, too, made a run for the door, but stopped when I realized that the stench was coming out of my mouth. Every breath I exhaled emanated a smell so sickening that it triggered my gag reflex. I tried to hold it in, but my abdominal muscles and diaphragm contracted violently, sending a burning sensation up my chest and into my throat. Expecting food or bile to come out, I knelt on the ground and bent over, but instead, all that came out was more of the smell, an endless stream of putrid odor that smelled like skunk mixed with rotten cabbage.

At some point, the chapel cleared out. I was on my knees in the middle of the aisle, alone, when I heard someone walking towards me. I looked up—it was the homeless man. It was him. He was behind all of this, that damned human being. My immediate reaction was to get up and tackle him to the ground, but my body ached so much I couldn’t move. As he moved towards me, the stench strangely began to fade, and instead, there was a faint trace of another scent. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it was an alluring scent—not just a scent you appreciated like that of a rose or lily, but an aroma that whetted your appetite and made you hungry. Not before long, he was standing over me. The stench had vanished and the fragrant scent by that point was overwhelming. The nausea was gone and I felt famished—stomach growling, mouth drooling, dying for food with a hunger that people probably only experienced in a famine, and I woke up, starving.

I checked the time, got dressed, and went down to the restaurant downstairs. It was Thursday afternoon. The wind and rain seemed be letting up. Shops had reopened and people returned to the streets just in time for the Easter weekend ahead. I opened the door and entered the fragrance that filled the restaurant—Yangzhou friend rice—the traditional Cantonese type with eggs, peas, bits of char siu, prawn, and scallions. I placed an order. As I waited, I stood at the counter of the restaurant watching as the chef stirred the rice in his wok, I thought about the sermon I was preparing for the weekend on the Parable of the Banquet. I wondered what that feast would be like, and whether it’d be anything like a Chinese banquet. Who would be there? Would I? What about the homeless man? Perhaps it was guilt, or maybe the voice of the Spirit, I placed a second order.

I stepped out onto the street, when the sky began to crack, releasing buckets of water splashing onto the sidewalk. Fallen leaves, branches, and litter were scattered all over. I held onto the bag of food with one hand. With the other, I opened my umbrella, shielding myself from the skies that roared above.

There were two umbrellas this time, both broken, positioned against the rails. The thundering rain, the neon signs, the fragrance from the restaurants, and exhaust from the busses and trucks all seemed to curtain the space around us.

He lifted his head. “You again. What do you want?” he asked, rubbing his eyes with both hands.

“I’m hungry,” I said, “Want to eat?”

Unexpectedly, he sighed, in the way old Chinese men do and said, “Come sit.” He shifted his belongings aside and made space on the cardboard.

I hesitated—reasons not to flooded my mind—but in the moment, it was the only thing that felt right. The cardboard was cold and wet. I took out a box of food and set it in front of him, “What you asked for.” He popped off the lid. The aroma of the rice filled the space between us. He smiled, showing his stained teeth before taking a spoon to dig in. He scooped each portion of rice with a gentle swoop; raising the spoon up to his mouth, he closed his mouth around the spoon, making sure to catch every grain, then chewed.

I opened my box and began to eat, spoon after spoon of fried rice. The aroma of the scallions and heat from the oil filled my nostrils, the bits of barbequed pork and chopped up bits of prawn tickled my tongue. I chewed meticulously after each bite, slowly filling the deep recesses of my stomach. The rain continued to drown out all that was around us. After what felt like a long time, I was stuffed. I thought I had eaten a lot, but there was still food left in the box.

“You want that?” he asked. I shook my head. He took my box, closed its lid, and put it by his bags.

By this point, I was tired. I needed to work on my sermon so I decided to leave. But as I attempted to push myself off the ground, I felt a deep sense of exhaustion as you would after running a marathon. Even the act of trying to get off the ground felt like an impossible task. I leaned back against the railing and tilted my head towards the sky. The rain splattered on my face, stinging my eyes. I opened my mouth, hoping to catch a few drops of rain to alleviate my thirst.

I heard the man crack open a bottle of water. “Drink,” he said, holding out the bottle to me.

I took the bottle. The first sip was bitter, reminding me of the first time I tasted wine at the Eucharist. I spit it out onto the floor. I scraped my tongue against my molars, hoping to get rid of the taste. The bitterness sunk in, burning my tongue and the walls of my mouth. “It’s bitter,” I pointed to the bottle.

“Just drink it.”

“You’re mad,” I set the bottle down on the floor. The bitterness triggered the muscles in my throat, which contracted, and I started to cough violently.

The man picked up the bottle. It had now accumulated a layer of condensation, making the bottle glow as it refracted light from the ceiling passing through it. He gazed into my eyes intently, and holding out the bottle, he repeated, “Drink it.” In that moment, as I was choking on my saliva and regurgitated food, coughing violently to the point where it felt like my lungs would come right out of my mouth, I had a moment of insight: if I didn’t drink this, I was going to die here on this bridge. I took the bottle from the man and began to drink, swallowing large gulps. The liquid tore at every tissue in my mouth and esophagus, clawing like scorpions.

The taste of the water gradually transformed. Each sip seemed less bitter, but also eased the sting. I continued to drink. Three-quarters way through the bottle, the water had not only regained its neutral flavor, but acquired a surprising sweetness to it. I felt my body regain strength, absorbing the water one molecule at a time. I set the empty bottle down, the sweet taste lingering in my mouth.

As I sat there next to the man, silent, watching the last drops of rain waver before finding their way off the edges of the railings, I thought about the gift—what happened to the pieces of the shattered mug? Did they remain there, ignored by pedestrians? Where they cleaned up and discarded? Were they washed away, bit by bit, by the thundering rain? At that point, overcome with a sense of release, I couldn’t help but close my eyes, stretch my arms wide as if I were reaching for the ends of the universe, and yell at the top my lungs.

The rumble of the sky eased into a gentle growl. The veils of rain lifted, revealing rays of light from the buildings, shop signs, and streetlights. A double-decker bus hummed past, its suspension squeaking. The clatter of pedestrians, children, and shopkeepers resonated, accented by clanging dishes and cups, gentle gusts of kitchen exhaust, and the faint clicks of crosswalk signals.

I stood up and looked down at the man. His eyes were closed and his body inclined against the rails. The rise and fall of his chest produced a gentle snort. Every so often, he’d wake himself up with his own snoring, but then he’d catch his breath and fall back into a lull. I noticed the wrinkles that lined his face, the streaks of white in his greasy disheveled hair, the cracked skin on his hands. He seemed older, frailer, more worn out than when I first met him. As I walked down from the bridge into the night, I looked up at the sky. It had cleared up, revealing a vast black canvas glistening with specks of shimmering dust. A thin film of water glazed the street, reflecting the bright sky above.

I never saw the man after that. The next time I crossed the bridge, it was clean as a whistle, no trace that anyone was ever there. Sometimes I’m not even sure what happened—it felt like it was all just a dream. Even to this day, I’m not sure where he came from or who exactly he was. Neither do I know whether there was anything I could’ve done to help him except bring him a box of fried rice. But I do know, now, that he had done for me something that I could’ve never done for myself.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I wrote this story shortly after working for a faith-based homeless service in Hong Kong. During that time, I was exposed to the long-lasting socio-economic remnants of British colonialism, the perpetuation of systemic injustice often through religion, and the imbalance of power between the rich and the poor in the city. At the same time, I saw great wealth in a community of people who did not have much, and beauty as they reclaimed the faith of the gweilo as their own. The experience forced me to consider my own faith and identity, so shaped by my life in the West, yet felt in many ways bankrupt compared to those whom many of us would want nothing to do with—poor, old, foreign, outsiders, neurodivergent. Even though it’s all too easy for many to idealize poverty from a comfortable distance, I think sometimes, it’s that initial gaze that makes us wonder whether what we need is often found in the places we least expect.

Wayne Mok is originally from Hong Kong and now lives in Sydney, Australia.

The Toaster

Fiction / Stephen Short

:: The Toaster ::

Pegatha Burroughs didn’t trust her toaster anymore. She only had it for three days and it displayed only dubious intent. She brought it home from the Southway Secondhand Store for four dollars. Her previous Toastmaster had finally bit the bullet after twelve years of devoted service. Every morning, two slices of plain white bread dropped to the glowing grills, and every morning, two slices of crisp toast jumped over the threshold and waited for her butter knife. But earlier in the week the Toastmaster made a barking sound and never baked the bread.

Peg hung her head low through the entrance to the Secondhand Store. She was ashamed that she had to come here. She tried not to look anyone in the eye, lest they recognize her from out in the world. It smelled like old paint and plastic. Peg tried not to touch anything if she could help it and hoped to beeline directly to the kitchen appliances. After a brief dalliance around the televisions she found them; waffle irons, cracked blenders, and the only toaster on the shelf; A tiny black number, two slots on top, and the depressor cocked at a slight angle. Four dollars showed the handwritten tag draped off the button. She slid it off the shelf and clutched it under her arm like a football. She pulled her hood lower. As she shuffled to the front counter, she heard crumbs spilling from the bottom of the toaster and they bounced off her coat. She set the toaster down to the scratched counter and saw a bottle of hand sanitizer near the register. She pumped a glob into her palm and slathered it over her ringed fingers, spattering. The cashier told her an amount that was slightly more than four dollars and Peg gave her a five to break, then pocketed the change and dashed out the glass doors.

On her counter she examined it fully. A black plastic covering with buff marks all over. Well used. It didn’t have a name. The depressor rested at its angle but would wobble to the exact opposite angle if tweaked. It made a scraping sound when pressed down. There was a spinning dial that was numbered from one to five, most likely indicating desired darkness of product, and currently set to four. Peg took a risk and set the dial to three. The crumb tray would not open. She flipped the toaster upside down over her trash can and jostled it the way unpaid musicians rattle maracas. Crumbs spilled everywhere but her trash can. She set it down on the counter where the old Toastmaster had gone and plugged the crinkled black cord into the wall. It sat there, unsuspecting, the rest of the evening.

In the morning Peg stumbled from her bed in her flowing nightshirt and wobbled out to the kitchen. She was a garbled mess of nerves. She smushed her glasses up her nose, unspun the loaf of plain white bread, and dropped them into the little black toaster. She pushed down on the depressor and the bread slipped inside with a screech. A slow orange glow sung out from the slits and Peg wrung her dry hands. The toaster gave a subtle buzz, letting her know it would be okay. “Yes,” she said only to herself. “I think so.” With confidence, she cracked the lid on her coffee pot and poured grounds into a filter, added water, and flipped the switch. She pulled a silver mug from the cupboard. She opened her sugar jar and uncapped a half gallon of milk. She clanked down a small orange ceramic plate and laid it next to the new toaster. It was empty. Completely breadless.

Peg stared down at the toaster. The depressor was up. There was no glow. There was no heat. She poked it. It shuffled a centimeter on her rough counter. The coffee pot was burbling and hot. Peg licked her chapped lips and picked at her knuckles. She unspun the loaf of plain white bread and dropped two slices into the new toaster. She turned the dial down to two. She plunged the depressor down with a squeal. The slow orange glow lit up her white bread and the mellow buzzing calmed her just so. She stood her ground and crossed her arms, her nightshirt crumpling wild and her shoulders tickling her ears. Peg locked her eyes on her bread and watched every pore brown over until it popped out of the toaster, a little less done than she’d prefer. She turned the knob back to three. She pulled the warm toast from the slots and buttered them near her coffee station. Sugar and milk in the coffee, toast in the mouth, Peg was happy.

She got a message from her daughter, Sheila. She needed more money transferred over. Sheila was a sophomore at the University of Alabama. She was studying Latin. She scraped Peg for every dollar she could spare and hurried off the phone before Peg could initiate any real conversation. But children needed to be cared for. Peg opened her phone to her banking app and transferred one hundred dollars to Sheila. Peg had twenty seven dollars left for the next week and a half.

Peg got to work exactly at 8am and left just after 5pm, making sure the day’s tasks were all completed. Her coworkers had left promptly at 5pm, if not earlier. She scheduled her doctor’s appointment at 5:45pm, knowing she would leave late. She had hip and back pain for several weeks now, and it took several weeks to get in with Dr. Kramer. She urinated far too much in her cup (“Just to the line,” the nurse had said) but she wanted to be sure. Given her age, Dr. Kramer suggested it was likely pain from sitting at skewed angles or strain from stress, and recommended a series of exercises and stretches for Peg to do at home. She suggested a yoga class or that she could do them at home with online instruction targeting her hips and low back, and to move to full body indefinitely. Alternatively, a chiropractor may prove effective but may not be covered by insurance. Peg had a dinner of peanut butter and grape jelly on white bread and a glass of milk and sat in front of the television to watch game shows. She thought about calling Sheila but talked herself out of it. During the next commercial break she talked herself back into it and poked her name on the phone screen. It rang once and went to voicemail. Peg turned the volume up on the television and finished her milk.

The next morning Peg crawled out of bed and slipped on her skinny robe and hobbled to the kitchen. She unspun the loaf of white bread and placed two slices in the slots of the new black toaster. She pushed the depressor down and it screamed in metal. A slow orange glow hugged her bread and the buzzing noise bounced off the kitchen walls and made Peg grin. She dumped yesterday’s coffee filter in the trash and added a new one, with coffee grounds and dumped water in the tank. She pulled a white mug from the cupboard, uncapped the sugar jar, and prepared the milk. She clanked a ceramic plate down to set near the new toaster and she gasped seeing that it was empty once more. Depressor up. No heat. Absolutely breadless. She lifted the new toaster and scrunched her face to peer inside the slits, shifting it so the kitchen light bled in. Peg jostled it about and crumbs sifted through the cracks but the drawer would still not open. She set it down and turned the darkness dial to four, then slipped in two pieces of bread to the slots and plunged the depressor down as it scraped. A slow orange glow rose about and a pleasant heat crept over her arms. Peg stared, unblinking, at the toaster, crisping her bread darker and darker. The coffee pot seared. The toast burst out of the slits and Peg shuffled a step forward and plucked her blackened slices to the plate. She turned the dial back to three. She buttered them and let it melt as she pulled her phone out. Sheila posted on social media that she was bored in her dorm. Peg dialed her number and it rang once before going to voicemail.

Peg got to work at exactly 8am and stayed just past 5pm once again, just like she always did. She made sure all the tasks were done despite her coworkers’ timely exits. On her way out of the glass doors her phone buzzed. Peg juggled it out of her coat pocket hoping to hear from Sheila, but it was just a text message from her bank informing her of her sad balance.

Peg drove straight home and set her bag and keys over the back of her chair at the kitchen table. She unspun the bread bag and slathered peanut butter on one slice and grape jelly on another. She filled a coffee mug halfway with milk and dropped into her old chair in the living room and put on game shows. Her phone buzzed and she snatched it from her thigh. It was a text from the phone company reminding her of her pending withdrawal for more than she had in her account.

Her hip stung and boiled pain to her leg and spine. Reluctantly, she turned off the game shows and dialed up beginner yoga videos just like Dr. Kramer had recommended. Peg followed the directions and heaved into positions she had never voluntarily entered. Arms splayed, legs askew. Her wrinkled face was contorted and strained. The voice on the television told her to breathe. She gasped and winced.

Peg woke the next morning and shuffled to the kitchen in her nightshirt. She unspun the bread bag and dropped two slices into the slits of the new toaster and pressed the plunger with a screech. She stared at the toaster while its careful buzz echoed. A slow orange glow calmed her and she adjusted her hip, remembering to breathe. Peg stepped back from the toaster towards the coffee pot on the opposite counter but didn’t look away. The dial was on three. The glow was still orange. Satisfied, she dumped yesterday’s grounds to the trash, filled a new filter with dry, and added water to the bin. Peg flipped the switch and it slurped to life. She pulled a white mug from the cabinet, unlidded the sugar jar, and placed the half-gallon of milk on the counter. She slipped a ceramic plate from the cupboard and walked to the new toaster to find it fully empty. Absolutely breadless. Peg felt a burning fury spilling from her forehead and she smacked the new toaster. It slid a few centimeters and some crumbs dribbled to the countertop. She hated to admit it but her hand was stinging from the hit. The coffee pot burbled. Peg unspun the bread loaf, which was disappearing faster than usual, and dropped one slice into a slot. She did not change the dial. She rounded her shoulders and clenched her teeth and stabbed the plunger down to a wail. A slow orange glow breathed from the wiring and Peg melted. She snapped back, remembering to be angry at the toaster, and stood clenched and huddled over the top of it, listening to the buzz. Her hip ached and she decided that part could unclench, but the shoulders, no way. Peg remembered the voice on the television telling her to relax and to breathe. She shut her eyes and heaved a strained breath past her lips. She noticed the heat left and the buzzing stopped. Peg burst her eyelids open to see the breadless toaster in front of her. She unplugged it. She plugged it back in, and dropped half a piece of bread into the other slot and dropped the plunger to a wiry wail. The glow didn’t calm her. She saw the bread crisping up then took a step backwards and stepped in a circle, turning away. The new toaster was empty when she spun back around. The other half of the bread went in a slot and the plunger went down to a screech. She closed her eyes before the slow glow could win and when she opened them back up the bread was gone.

Peg hobbled over to the kitchen table, spilling over with torn envelopes and receipts. She grabbed a bill and folded it down and stuffed it in a toaster slot. She pressed it down screeching. The slow orange glow pleased her as she saw smoke rising from the grills. She closed her eyes. The new toaster was empty. Absolutely billess. Peg poured out her coffee and added extra sugar and slurped it, staring at the toaster.

Pegatha Burroughs didn’t trust her toaster anymore. She unplugged it and scooped it in both hands and moved it to the other counter. She picked it back up and set it on the kitchen table. She stepped back.

She did not arrive at work at 8am. She drove to the Southway Secondhand Store with the black toaster buckled into the passenger seat. Peg held it out like a bomb and waddled to the front glass doors and rattled them; closed until 11.

Peg re-buckled the toaster and waited on the side of the street. Her phone buzzed and she fumbled the screen on. Sheila texted asking for more money. Peg called her. The phone rang once and went to voicemail. Peg opened her banking app and transferred fifteen dollars to Sheila. She got a notification from the bank about the sad balance she had remaining. Sheila messaged again complaining about the meager transfer. Peg called her. The phone rang once and went to voicemail. She set her phone down next to the toaster. It buzzed. The power company was informing her of the pending withdrawal which was much more than she had in her account.

Southway Secondhand Store would not open for several hours. She drove to work and clocked in late. On her lunch break she went back to the store and hauled the toaster in underneath one arm, sliding her hood forward over her hair.

“I need to return this.” She set the toaster down. Crumbs fell to the blue plastic counter.

“We don’t take returns.” Peg didn’t look her in the eye.

“It was four dollars.”

“We don’t take returns,” the teen repeated.

Peg couldn’t look her in the eyes but lifted her head and focused on the ceiling fan. “Please,” she said.

“I can’t give you your money back, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

Peg dropped her head back down and crossed her arms. She tried not to lean on her hip. “Just take it back then. I’ll donate it.” She spun around and burst out the door.

Peg stayed later at work to make up for the time missed in the morning. At home she made herself a dinner of a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, folded over on one piece of bread. She called Sheila. The phone rang once and went to voicemail. A message from the water company notified her of a pending withdrawal which was much more than she had in her account. She threw her phone across the room to the couch and it bounced off to the floor. Her jaw clenched, her hip burned, her back stilted.

Peg crawled to her flattened carpet and pulled up the next yoga video in line. She tugged off her socks and spread her bent toes at hip distance. The voice on the television told her to breathe. She heaved. The voice told her to breathe in light and breathe out darkness, weight, unneeded things. A rattle of air wheezed out of her throat while she folded her body upside over. Close your eyes, the voice said. Breathe.

Peg bumbled out of bed in her skinny robe and stalked to the counter that didn’t have a toaster on it. She closed her eyes and breathed. She heeled to the coffee pot and dumped yesterday’s grounds, then filled a new filter and the tank at the back. It growled water up. She pulled a black mug from the cupboard, uncapped her sugar jar, and prepped the half-gallon of milk. She dug a small ceramic plate out. Peg unspun the loaf of plain white bread and stared at the crumby section where no toaster waited. She buttered a limp piece while her coffee pot hissed. Peg didn’t know how to eat plainly buttered bread. She resorted to tearing hunks off and popping them in her mouth. She even dunked some into her coffee, just to try it.

She limped into work five minutes early, as usual, and cleaned up what the others left behind to leave at 5:15pm. Her keys and bag slung over the kitchen chair, she unspun the emptying bag of bread and made a folded peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich with a cold glass of milk. Her phone buzzed and she scrambled across the counter to her bag. It was Sheila, sending a text in all caps. Peg dialed her number and the phone rang once and went to voicemail. She asked her phone to remind her to respond in an hour. Her phone buzzed again with a notification from the phone company that her payment was unsuccessful. To her surprise, another notification came from the power company that her payment was, too, unsuccessful. Peg coolly observed her phone receiving the messages and her lights still on. She stretched to the left and to the right, with each opposite hip jutting out, burning a strip down her leg.

The voice on the television told her to breathe. Inhale light. Exhale darkness, weight, unneeded things. The voice told her to thank herself for committing to her practice. Peg was pressing her pelvis into the carpet and her shoulders and back screamed. She unpretzeled and flipped over to game shows. The reminder on her phone told her to respond to Sheila. Her banking app issued her a warning when she logged in. She transferred five dollars to Sheila and grimaced at her single-digit balance. Peg shut off the television and went to bed earlier than usual.

Peg slipped out of bed in her gray nightshirt and sneered at the toasterless countertop. She dumped grounds, added more in a filter, filled the back with water, and flipped the pot on. She unspun the plain loaf of white bread and dug two pieces out and slathered together a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich for breakfast. It didn’t pair well with her coffee. Her hip and back burned.

She made it to work five minutes early and left alone late. She drove to the opposite end of town to the department store and shuffled through throngs of tired shoppers to housewares. Peg eyed a new Toastmaster but noted its price. She checked for any other toaster but none were in the single-digit range. There in the aisle, she bent at the waist and her back creaked as she dragged her fingertips on the tongues of her shoes. Breathe, she heard the voice on the television say.

Peg arrived at the Southway Secondhand Store before they closed and didn’t bother putting her hood up. She found the toaster. It was the only one on the shelves. Black plastic with two slits on top and a radial dial that went from one to five. It was pointed to three. The plunger was tilted at a slight angle. The price tag dangling from the plunger read three dollars. She heard the voice on the television telling her to exhale unneeded things. She closed her eyes and exhaled.

She paid three dollars and tax at the counter, buckled the toaster into her passenger seat, and plunked it down on the crumby countertop at home. She plugged it into the wall. Peg walked to the living room and put on the next video in the yoga series. Her bony ankles kissed and the voice on the television told her to inhale light, more than she would normally breathe comfortably. Exhale darkness, the voice told her, and all unneeded things. Her phone rang and buzzed around the table. Peg saw it was Sheila calling. She closed her eyes. Inhale, the voice said, exhale deeply, the voice said. Peg creaked her body over itself, exhaling, inhaling. The phone buzzed again and Peg blew air through rounded lips. She felt light and faint as smoke. The voice on the television told her to thank herself for her commitment today. Without any air of pretense, Peg thanked herself fully.

Peg rolled to her feet. She felt a long twang down her hip, different than before, as if blood found new corners to paint in her vessels. She toed to the kitchen and stared at the new toaster. Plastic black, scuffed, tilted plunger, dial pointed to three.

She unspun the loaf of plain white bread and dunked things into the slits.

She pressed the plunger and metal screeched. A slow orange glow lit up the grills and crisped the bread and warmed her fingertips. Inhale light, she heard the voice on the television say. Exhale darkness, and all unneeded things. Peg’s attention turned to her pocket which was missing her phone. She stared at the toaster with rabid intent. Inhale, the voice said, exhale. Peg opened her lungs to fill her chest, and dragged in deeper when she thought it was at maximum. She saw the bread becoming toast surrounded by the glow. Peg anticipated the voice ringing in her brain, to exhale, and she closed her eyes and felt the glow on her face and let the air drift out of her lungs. Her body was warm, her face was warm. She couldn’t hear her phone buzz, and she didn’t care it wasn’t in her pocket. When she was out of air, she clenched and heaved just a little bit more out, still warm. Peg opened her eyes and the plunger of the toaster screamed back up. Her toast came out to a small ceramic plate and she buttered it with the room temperature stick on the counter. It didn’t pair well with her milk, but better than her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich did with her coffee.

Peg woke the next morning and had coffee and toast, like she always did. She arrived at work a few minutes after 8am to little fanfare and left precisely on time.

From the writer

:: Account ::

The Toaster is a short fiction piece that puts a spin on the “try/fail” cycle. Initially conceived to be a pseudo-horror piece, it ended up pulling me in a different direction to address ideas of anxiety, self-worth, and the L‑word. I often write of characters struggling to go about their day-to-day or at least get back to it despite outside influences. While writing this piece I was thinking of Jeff VanderMeer, who is loose and eccentric with his descriptions and word choice. A remarkable opposite to that is my always-influence, Raymond Carver, who communicates so much with so little. I don’t think I’ll ever forget, “I did the drinks,” in Cathedral. This piece isn’t quite so minimal but doesn’t strive to be overly complex or include unnecessary information. I trust the reader to form the image I’m trying to convey as my ideas are less about the reader seeing a clear picture and more about the reader feeling a nebulous weight. I think saying too much more may spoil the experience of the story, so I thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy it.

Stephen Short is a native of the wintry Pacific Northwest and a non-traditional student at Washington State University. He writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. His work is influenced by the pared down selections of Raymond Carver and the verbose eccentricity of Jeff VanderMeer. Stephen sincerely wishes you a fantastic day and life.

There’s Nothing Left For You Here

Fiction / Allegra Solomon

:: There’s Nothing Left For You Here ::

I realized my neighbor was seeing the guy across the hall around the time things were getting rocky for them. Someone more astute may have put the puzzle together sooner; may have correlated the unvaried echo of the two doors closing. His, having freshly left her. Hers, after having watched him go. How one day their animalistic, guttural moans came crooning from my left, then directly across from me. It was electric the way their connection presented itself to me. The presentation itself was a slow crawl, but when it came, it was gleaming.

Earlier that year, I heard them arguing through the thin wall that separated my neighbor’s unit from mine. My ear was cold against the plaster. I was addicted to this coldness; it was soothing, medicinal even. The argument wasn’t a shouting match. It was coated in subtext—it was something quiet and brewing. Glimmers of the spat echoed to me—my neighbor’s puppyish prodding, her boyfriend’s stoic, male indifference— and then I heard the sound of her front door closing.

We’re okay right? He said.

She said, Of course.

The interaction was almost lost to the white noise of my heater. It was in that moment I decided to take out my trash.

In the hallway, I saw him pushing her against her door with his hands in her hair as they feverishly kissed. A pink mess of lips and skin, missing the mouth more than making it. I made a note not to look at anyone too directly—to beeline for the trash room—but I have never been good at resisting temptation.

There it was: His black nails. Her shut eyes. I drank it up quickly, in one passive blink and the afterimage of them burned behind my eyelids in a crisp orange outline. When the girl saw me coming, she squeaked a noncommittal plea of resistance that dissipated as soon as it appeared I didn’t care.

It was quite the opposite; the two of them compelled me beyond belief. There isn’t much else to it than this: I was awfully bored back then.

All of my closest friends had moved out of state the year before and none of us were good at maintaining emotional closeness over that much of a distance. My childhood best friend and simultaneous ex-boyfriend of five years decided that what we had was not a romantic love and never was. There were no good shows on TV and the midwestern winter was a force. What else was there to do? I let my home swallow me whole.

In my boredom, I’d started to toy with the concept of reinventing myself. This was originally out of entertainment. Not appearance-wise. I moreso wondered what would happen if I went against all my natural instincts and did what was thrilling rather than what I usually did, which was what was right. Act on impulse for any level of gratification without thinking of the effects, just to move my blood around. It wasn’t always anything big. Sometimes I would steal candy from Walgreens and then throw it away because I could. Eavesdrop on my neighbors. Stare at people real long in public and watch them unravel before me. When I got delivery food I would either tip entirely too well or not at all, depending on the day and my mercurial temperament. It felt like I was grabbing my life by the neck and choking it out, deadpan.

Work had become the only social aspect of my life. I worked at Best Buy, recommending printers and televisions to fill the dead air. There was a guy I worked with named Josiah who would flirt with me in the breakroom—call me cute, short versions of my name while everyone else addressed me by every letter. Run his fingers up and down my forearms while we sat in the Nintendo aisle and argued about the most effective character to use in what game. His girlfriend was a nearly six-foot brunette. She lifted regularly at the gym and could kill me if she wanted, but—to her disadvantage— had the sweet, soprano voice of a Sesame Street character. She always picked him up at the end of the day or brought him lunch when her law school schedule allowed. I went out of my way to strike up a cordial friendship with her; ask her how the first year was going, make subtle jabs at Josiah to seem like a non-entity. Some days we would sit and talk for half an hour alone before she went over to him. On my birthday in January, she brought me a cookie with my first initial on it in icing. My complex relationship with her was one of my main sources of entertainment. The rush it gave me was too addicting to stop.

At home I would usually watch old episodes of New Girl or Everybody Hates Chris until my neighbors started up again. Some days my ex-boyfriend would stop by to collect some of his old things, but he always left quickly, without much word or touch.

Things with my neighbors became most enticing in February. There was a night where I heard the front door slam hard as they walked in the house; coming from—what I’d decided was—a dinner. I heard the bass in his voice, followed by the hard, undulating treble of hers.

I turned down New Girl and returned my ear to it’s home on that cold wall.

What about Christmas? She said. You wouldn’t want to spend it with my family?

That’s ten months from now, the guy said.

And?

And so, we don’t have to worry about that right now.

You don’t think we’ll be together in ten months?

I didn’t say that.

There was a soft, barely discernable whimper and then things were quiet again. I went back to my show and turned the sound all the way up.

I never heard the guy leave her house that night, or if he had, I missed it because my ex-boyfriend had called and asked if I still had his Cavs jersey.

Yes, I said, because you gave it to me.

He asked for it back calmly, and when I didn’t say anything, he said, I’m kind of worried about you, by the way.

I laughed. Why?

Because you seem very lonely. Who do you talk to all day?

My neighbor.

Anyone else? he asked. You’re not being self-destructive, are you?

Not yet, I said. Maybe it would be good for me.

I don’t think that’s true. You’re a very logical and empathetic girl.

You worry about me a lot for someone who ended things.

He sighed.

Love is not exclusively romantic. I can still care about you. Quit isolating yourself—the pity party is getting boring. Then, he hung up.

The next day at work I realized I didn’t really know what my neighbors’ faces looked like, and I didn’t know their names. This was exciting—it still is, remembering that mystery and what was possible inside of it. How my impositions still held water. I had just learned the girl had orange hair—I caught a glimpse in the hallway the night before. I knew the guy had jet black hair and pale skin, but that was all. Before I’d seen them, I had imagined them to both be blondes—that maybe they’d look eerily similar. They seemed like the type of white people to be attracted to a version of themselves. I imagined her apartment had pastel monograms of her initials on any bare wall space and a tank for ill cared for goldfish. Through the wall my neighbor had the muffled voice of a petite, five foot, stick thin sorority girl. In reality she was this tall, round, redhead with freckles. In terms of stature, the two of them looked each other square in the eyes.

Where’s your mind at, Josiah asked. He was leaning back against a row of Mario games that avalanched onto the floor while he played with the hem of my polo. I was standing in front of him, spacing out into the open air over his shoulder.

I’m just thinking about my neighbor, I said, as though I was far away. She’s dating the guy across the hall. I think they’re fighting.

She your friend?

I nodded.

Relationships are complicated, he said. My girl and I fight all the time.

Because you’re a cheater?

I’m not a cheater, he laughed. If I was a cheater, we wouldn’t be standing out on this floor right now.

Josiah held my eyes for a long time before I broke the gaze and poked his chest.

I like your girlfriend, anyways.

Right. You two are all buddy buddy now. What’s that about?

I don’t know, I said. I could feel him affectionately tugging on my shirt as I began to disappear into my mind. I think it makes me feel powerful.

He flashed his teeth, laughed, then said with a mix of edge and intrigue, Most people wouldn’t admit that.

I came home later than usual that night, having been stuck in traffic. The guy across the hall usually went to my neighbor’s place around eight, and I was afraid if I was late I would miss an essential storyline. There had been many. I’d counted about three. A pregnancy scare, a forgotten birthday, unmatched love languages. (I wish you would compliment me more, she’d said once. I just told you that your earrings look cool, he said.) The pregnancy scare made me celibate for weeks, though, I suppose that had less to do with agency and more to do with the way things just were. When she forgot his birthday it wasn’t a big deal, but it was obvious to me, a room away, that he was downplaying it. One time he waited in her house while she was gone to the store and he talked on the phone to one of his friends about it. (Yeah, we didn’t do anything, he said. No, no, it’s not a big deal. You know I’m not big on birthdays anyways. Yeah, it would have been nice but, you know.)

It was certainly a relationship forged by attraction alone, and the mess of this reality began to creep up behind them. Though, none of this was important. This was a matter of self; I did not want them to break up.

When I got to my floor, I could already hear them as I passed by her door to get to mine. Desperate sobs. Akin to the pregnancy scare sobs, but less existential—more heartbroken. Long, deep, drawn out—like being pushed out of a brass instrument. Underneath those sobs was the guy saying, Come on. Are you serious? You knew this!

I stopped in front of her door and pressed my ear to it—a high-risk urge much easier to succumb to than you might expect. I could hear much better out there; the sounds were crisp and alive, like I was standing in the living room with them.

You knew this. Like—I told you that at the start, the guy said.

I didn’t know you were still seeing other people, though. I thought we were past that.

Her sobs got caught in her throat.

I am. I am, but I like you both. That doesn’t take anything away from you.

I can’t believe this.

Come on.

I can’t believe this.

To be fair, I had assumed she knew. Occasionally when she wasn’t home, I would hear him walk into his place, laughing along with a voice that wasn’t hers. It was always so conveniently timed that I assumed it was an arrangement. Her heaving proved otherwise, but it was entertaining, nonetheless.

There was an abrupt sound of heavy footsteps and the telltale sign of a lock being undone. I slowly and as unpanicked as possible, walked to my door and began to put the key in.

The two of them were suddenly outside with me. It felt familial, though neither of them noticed my presence.

Go. She pointed to his door.

Oh my God.

I’m serious. Go play with your other toy.

At this, I went into my apartment, only to get a better visual through my peephole. That was the money shot. At first, I could only see him—his back pressed against his front door, and his arms spread eagle, grasping for a way out.

We talked about this. You know monogamy isn’t for me.

Then go—be free.

She walked so she was standing in his face, forehead to forehead with him. They yelled at each other for another five minutes before she said, I’m done, and walked back into her apartment. There were her footsteps; the click of the door opening; the slam; and then nothing.

The silence that followed was the quietest it had been in a month or two. I laid in bed and watched the ceiling fan turn until the arms of it liquified into one solid circle around the lights. I stared at the lights until it hurt my eyes; the bright circles, blinking residually in my view as I assessed my room. I had already been through both New Girl and Everybody Hates Chris’ entire series respectively five and four times; there were no surprises left. There was nothing. Not even a drone of white noise or leaking faucet water. I checked my phone and I had no texts. Instagram was mostly people I didn’t talk to anymore. One of my friends that moved away slid up on a story I posted about Insecure ending and said: I guess Lawrence can stay. I liked it and said: Girl, I guess. I scrolled through the rest of our messages since she moved away. They were all about as inconsequential as that. YouTube proved to be temporarily mind numbing and I watched a video essay about Mark Rothko. When that video ended, I stared at my reflection in the black screen and traced the outline of myself in the collected dust.

I found myself knocking on my neighbor’s door before I could think better of it. Like a quick flash—my knuckles were against the hardwood, and then she was twisting the knob.

Her face was all red—freckles disappeared in the tear stained, inflamed skin. A mane of curls cascading down to her shoulders.

Yeah? She looked me up and down.

Hey. I live over there.

She just nodded, prodding me for the point.

I’m sorry, I began again. I just wanted to know if I could borrow a tampon.

She broke an apologetic smile that was crooked on its left side. Her face fell in a way that seemed she was embarrassed of her brashness.

God. Yeah, sorry. Here, just, um— She opened her door and motioned for me to come in. What do you want—light? Super?

She lived in a one bedroom that mirrored mine. The bathroom was in that first hallway, and I scanned her place as she disappeared into it. There was none of the personalized monogrammed art I’d expected. No goldfish. In fact, the walls were mostly empty aside from a few stock Ikea paintings and one lone, practically vintage One Direction poster right above her bed. The apartment smelled of nothing—no candles, no sprays, no oil diffusers, which was so un-twenty-something-year-old-girl like of her I wondered if there was something wrong with her. There was one withering set of flowers on the kitchen island, but that was all. I decided I liked my version of her place more—it felt truer.

I’ll take what I can get, I said.

What’s your name?

She was rummaging through the cabinet under the sink, pulling out hair straighteners and hair ties alike. I told her what it was.

That’s funny, she said. You look like one.

Then she told me her name was Darleen, and I told her she looked like one too.

It’s supposed to mean Darling—loved one, she said. Which, I don’t feel much like right now.

Mine means “Filled heart,” I said with air quotes.

Accurate?

I shook my head. No. Not right now.

She walked out of the bathroom with three tampons—two light, one super. Her body was swimming in an oversized Mets t‑shirt, as if it was nightgown. As she placed them in my hand, she said, I know you can probably hear us. Sorry about that.

Don’t worry about it. Seriously. I put the tampons in my pocket.

I used to hear you, too, actually. That guy.

Ah. I nodded my head. Sorry.

No, it’s okay. I thought about you, actually. I hoped you were alright when I noticed he stopped coming around.

There was a moment of silence that sat a bit too long, but it maintained a softness I felt could be useful to me.

It’s that guy right? The one that lives across from me?

She smiled and nodded her head—still fond at the thought of him, despite everything that had just happened.

Yeah. It’s a funny story, actually. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.

Sure. Thanks for these.

I walked back into my apartment and put the tampons in the box with the others I had.

For a while, it did not seem like they were going to get back together. Because of this, it was silent in my apartment for three weeks. This was bad for me—I needed them to occupy my mind while home. I started taking extra shifts at work just to stay out the house. I would hope to come home and hear anything—them laughing, talking, fighting, fucking. But there was nothing. My ex-boyfriend had stopped coming by because he’d effectively gotten back everything that he wanted—excluding the Cavs jersey—but would call occasionally. It was always out of concern; out of the platonic love we’d built since we were children. At some point I stopped answering him. It felt like the wrong decision to make, so I made it. The residual high satiated me for a while. I called some of my old friends a time or two, but it was always brief and mostly unexciting in the way things never were when they still lived in town. Podcasts became important to me quickly. After work, I would sit outside the store and watch the cars go by.

During the third week of silence, I burned my hand badly at work. I was heating up water in a mug to make tea, and while taking it out of the microwave, I spilled it all over me. The skin temporarily became flimsy and loose, and the pain reduced me to a child. Whimpering and jumping as I shook my hand, like I’d fallen off my bike and needed a kiss. A few of my co-workers helped me get ice until Josiah came in and said, You’re not supposed to ice it. Here, run it under room temperature water. He took my hand in his and ran the water over both of ours like it was his pain too. We stood there like that—his thumb gliding over the inside of my hand, soothing it— until I told him I felt okay. He then sat me down and rubbed Neosporin on my palm. Nice and slow, to savor the moment. We didn’t talk much. I sat still and let him take care of me. It was then that I realized I had not touched anyone in a long time. I had not kissed anyone, hugged anyone, had my hand delicately loved on. It was a sudden but alarming revelation— discovering I was willing to do anything for it.

There was not much else. I attempted to build a bookshelf. Picked up a poetry book an old friend posted on her Instagram story. I started going for walks. Any control I felt I had dwindled into a thin string I could hardly tie. I had a close call stealing a candle from Bath & Body Works. I wasn’t able to sleep all the way through the night, even with melatonin. I laid in bed most nights and filled the absence with my mind. I imagined they were talking on the other side of that wall, or perhaps, they were talking to me. Those moments felt awfully normal.

In that forth week, Darleen knocked on my door. Her face was hardly visible in the overgrowth of her hair. When I opened the door she had a bottle of Cabernet in her hand, dangling like a weight. Before I could speak, she just said:

I’m kinda drunk, so kick me out if you want— but I need to talk to someone and no one is answering my calls.

I would have been more offended under different circumstances, but my need for company was stronger than my pride.

The girl scanned my walls inquisitively, walked right up to a candle I had burning and took a strong whiff—told me the candle smelled like “man.”

It’s fennel and pine, I said.

Fennel and pine, she repeated absently. Her voice was softer, and raspier than I remembered. She took her free hand to scratch her forehead and began to lazily walk through the room, picking up notebooks before putting them down—opening and closing the blinds like they were some kind of puzzle. She thumbed at the tape holding up a Sade poster over the couch and I fought the urge to tell her to stop.

You’re not busy? she asked, rolling one of my pens around the inside of her wine-stained fingers. I shook my head. Can I just vent to you? She asked.

Of course. I repressed my excitement.

Literally stop me anytime. She then sat down at the kitchen table and began tearing up.

She and the guy started seeing each other in November. He had knocked on her door to see if she had a bottle opener. He never gave it back to her, so a week later she went over to get it—I had bottles to open too, you know—and he was like, I can’t find it. Here, come in. She sat at his counter, and they talked for two hours. I remember thinking he smelled like a forest, she said. Right after rain.

The opener was in the kitchen drawer the entire time. And then they fell into a routine. She said at the beginning he did mention he was seeing other people, though, of course, she assumed it was for the time being. When they started seeing each other every day she assumed she was the only one, and all those nights he didn’t come home she thought he was out being a drunken man with his friends at bars.

He’s been texting me, but I haven’t texted him back, yet.

Yet? I sat up.

I know it’s bad. I like him, but I don’t love him. We aren’t entirely good for each other but, sometimes you just take what you can get. You know?

I do, I said. I looked at her; body perched in one of my kitchen chairs, sipping directly from the bottle.

You seem to be coping with your breakup well, though.

I shrugged. I wondered how she would feel knowing how much I knew about their relationship, or the role she played in the coping.

He was the last person close to me that still lived in town, I added, rocking back on the hind legs of my chair. All our other friends slowly got city jobs and moved away one by one.

So, what do you get up to now?

Nothing. I’m very bored these days. I try to find ways to entertain myself.

What’s that thing? She said, in a bubbly, burpy giggle. The idle mind being the devil’s playground?

She drank more of her wine, and I watched it fall down her throat in cartoon-like gulps. It occurred to me that this interaction might not be significant to her. Just a drunken therapy to exorcise her thoughts on her boyfriend—I, the only person present enough to help her do so—and in the morning, this would all be a hazy half memory, which could be qualified as a dream.

I was a place holder. She was white noise. I suppose we all do what we must to get by.

I have this idea of hitting rock bottom and becoming a worse version of myself, to then come back refined, I said.

She stared at me blankly. Why would you do that?

It might be fun. Keep me busy. It’s like playing a video game. Making all these bad decisions, but they’re mine to make.

Okay.

It was said as a half thought—her mind was elsewhere. She set the wine bottle down on the kitchen table. It was mostly empty and left a nice red ring on my white tablecloth. Then she said, I think I’m going to take him back soon.

Even if he’s still seeing that other girl.

She nodded.

I’ll just deal with it. I’m not good at being alone. Does that make me a bad person?

I’m not the best person right now, so you’re asking the wrong one.

You keep saying that. She drunkenly tilted her head to the right, and it made her whole body sag a little. What do you mean? She asked smally. Like, what are you doing?

I mean, I sighed. I might fuck my co-worker.

That’s not bad.

He has a girlfriend, though. And she’s really nice. I like her.

Oh.

She squirmed a bit in her chair and averted eye contact. I realized that maybe her version of a bad person and mine weren’t exactly mirrored definitions, but we were operating from the same core.

After a moment of silence, I saw her face tighten. She said, Please don’t remind me of any of this in the morning, okay? Then stood up to throw up in the bathroom toilet. I could hear it echoing and splattering against the porcelain sides all the way from the living room. The retching was violent. I knew she would remember none of this the next morning.

I joined her on my knees, gathering her hair in my once burned hand like rope, and held her as her body lurched forward. After, I wiped her face softly with a towel, gave her water, and walked her back to her apartment. Inside, she climbed into a big sweatshirt—It doesn’t even smell like him anymore, she said— and I laid her down in bed, pushing a trashcan to her bedside.

Lock the door, I called back. She said nothing.

Once back in my apartment, I wrote on a piece of paper: BUY HER FLOWERS. SHE WILL TAKE YOU BACK and slid it under the guy’s door.

Work was slow the next day because there had been an ice storm. The roads were slick and empty, which gave us all free reign to be on our phones or take turns playing different consoles when our managers weren’t looking. Josiah and I hung at the back of the store, standing as close as possible to the HD screens to see what it did to our eyes.

The thing is, I genuinely liked him as a person. He was dark skinned, had a head full of hair, and was twice my size—which was just my type. Our humors aligned in a way he often told me him and his girlfriend’s did not. I’m sure it was an intentional manipulation, but I didn’t mind—it felt warm.

There was an HQ replay of a Steelers game unfolding before us. I was making a comment about how it felt like 4‑D Smell-o-vision when he took my hand and used it to touch my hair.

You do it yourself? He asked, eyes not leaving mine once.

I smacked my teeth. Come on now.

He smiled. You know how do to cornrows?

Obviously.

He then took the hand and touched it to his head. I could feel the minute coils on my fingertips, already working themselves to burrow under my hangnails.

You think you can do mine? My girl’s out of town.

I paused.

When? I asked.

Tonight.

Around that time, I often felt like I was suspended somewhere in the air, watching myself live and act and breathe. Observing my body move around powerfully from outside my body, like a video game—removed from my actions, my consequences. In that moment, I returned to my bones.

Except for Darleen, no one new had been to my apartment in a long time. When we walked in, I become hyper aware of the rolled up, dirty white mountain of socks in the corner by my vinyl—the way the couch frayed white where leather should have been. Where it once was.

Josiah walked to the front of the room and thumbed through a poetry book that was sitting on the TV stand, skimming page seventy.

Are you gonna show me around? He asked.

There’s only two rooms, I said, more soft and less assured than anything else I’d ever said to him.

So, show me them.

He motioned me towards him. When I was standing in front of him he playfully turned me around by my shoulders and pointed to the painting above the couch. What’s this?

I showed him the black and white Pollock imitation—left out that it was something my ex-boyfriend and I had worked on together, long before we’d even dated. I showed him the candles I hoarded and how they lived in the box under the TV stand, because I don’t burn them faster than I buy them.

And this? he asked, picking up a golf ball sitting on my desk.

An old friend and I found it on a walk a long time ago.

You seem like a sentimental person, he said, earnestly in a breath. I shrugged and became very hot suddenly.

I have been one at times.

We walked onto my balcony and spit off of it onto the cement—it was his idea. He said he used to do that a lot in the place he grew up. A small apartment not too different from mine.

I felt it again then— a pinch of control while up there wielding our agency like gods. The pinch felt too much a moment later when his hand touched my back and asked if we should wash his hair.

Yes, I heard myself say. There was an electricity in the air. A shift had occurred. I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I was still trying to decide what kind of person I was.

We stood in the kitchen—he in front of me, back bent, head under the sink faucet. The room smelled like argon oil and mint—strongly gripping at the nose.

I used to love when my mom washed my hair like this, he said. And then, in the most airy, sincere voice I’d ever heard from him, I think this just brought back a formative memory.

I’ve never done this to someone before, actually.

I feel lucky, he laughed. To be your first.

My fingers were tangled in shampoo, washing and lathering his hair from the back, hardly able to reach over his tall frame. He laughed when I used my nails to really get in there. We were so close. I could see the open brown skin of his scalp and the way his hair sponged and soaked up the product. Something about seeing the top of his head, vulnerably caring for him in this way, humanized him to me. Proved he was breathing, warm to the touch, with blood inside. A person, with aches, hungers, memories. When he was a kid his mother washed his hair over the sink, and he used to spit off balconies— the facts of a real person with a real life. He was himself, and a son, and boyfriend. He was a boyfriend, and I was cradling his head softly in my hands.

When I asked if he okay he said, Yes—please, keep going. This feels good.

It had been more intimate that I had expected; the act of washing his hair and feeling the heat of his body alone in my home as opposed to the open exhibition of our job. It felt concrete, not just a playful, casual teetering on an awful edge for our own pleasure. It was clear that this could be the beginning of a consistent complication.

When we finished, I sat in a chair—he sat on the floor at my feet, facing the television. As time went on, I became quieter. Treading cautiously. I blow dried his hair as slowly as possible, attempting to find out if I was more moral than desperate, more selfish than kind, all while watching his hair go smooth in my hands.

When I clicked the blow dryer off, behind the sound of the television was my neighbor talking. There were two voices, dripping with the specific affection that comes post-reconciliation. She cooed and the guy laughed. I love them, I love them, she said loudly, and I wondered if she wanted me to hear. Yeah? He replied.

They don’t sound like they’re fighting anymore, Josiah said.

Yeah, I guess they’re not. She’s weak for him. I ran the end of a rattail comb down the middle of his head to form a part. They probably shouldn’t be together if I’m being honest.

Who cares? Everyone’s just doing what feels best to them, he said standing up.

He turned towards me and asked if the part looked straight, extending a hand so I would stand up too. His eyes scanned me as I stood in front of him re-drawing the part, pushing some hairs to the side, avoiding the warmth on my face and what I’d like to do about it if I was, in fact, more desperate than moral. His shoulders and my forehead were level with each other. Suddenly, my face was being held in his rough hands, pulling my gaze up so we were looking at each other. I took the comb and adjusted all the zig-zagging parts, making it as straight as possible. He licked his lips.

Remember what you told me you weren’t, I said, quietly. At work that day.

I do.

What are you now?

In this moment? He laughed. I’m still not.

It just seemed like in that moment, us being out on the floor was the deciding variable.

I suppose you’re right.

Josiah and I stood in a charged silence, and then he added, You don’t have any roommates that are gonna come knocking, right? I shook my head. Any friends that just show up?

No, I said. No friends that show up.

Boyfriend?

No, I said. No boyfriend.

He nodded as his hands travelled cautiously to my lower back. Josiah’s lips brushed against my neck as he leaned down to my ear.

That power you felt, he whispered. Do you still feel it?

His fingers pressed into my back slow and soft, as if playing a chord. My body knew that movement. It hummed. I exhaled as he inhaled, and I felt it as one.

To be honest, it all happened very quickly. I couldn’t bring myself to speak—I just leaned into the touch.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This story came to me in 2021 as the pandemic was still present, but the culture and precautions were not the same as they’d been the year before. I’d become hyper aware of my isolation and all the futile ways I’d attempt to feel connected to others. Escapism at the time seemed to be the only bit of refuge—whether that be escaping online, in media, books, or my own imagination. I could often hear my neighbors through our adjoined wall, and I would wonder about them.

I’d spoken to many people about how they’d dealt with their loneliness at that time, and it became clear to me that desperation lived with many people. I am always interested in what desperation leads a person to, and after the lonely period that followed 2020, this felt like a story I needed to write.

Allegra Solomon is a Black fiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky and her B.A. in Creative Writing from Ohio University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, American Literary Review, Lolwe and more. She was the University of Kentucky’s 2022 recipient of the Fiction MFA award. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky