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The Work

Art / Tyler Dunston

 

:: Stellar Cloud ::

Pho­tog­ra­phy, 52x26”

From the writer

 

::  Account ::

I began as a painter, cre­at­ing abstrac­tions pri­mar­i­ly with oils and mixed media. As I have expand­ed into oth­er media—photography, sculp­ture, etc.—I have tried to cre­ate abstrac­tions that evoke paint with­out paint. This pho­to is from sequence of pho­tos titled “Stel­lar Clouds,” which is a series of attempts to paint with light using a dig­i­tal cam­era. This process is inspired by the work of Agnès Var­da, who has talked about the for­tu­itous, so-called mis­takes of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, and by the work of Ralph Eugene Meat­yard. Using a point-and-shoot cam­era in low light, I approach abstrac­tion in pho­tog­ra­phy much as I would in paint­ing, but the process is some­what dif­fer­ent. Cre­at­ing these works requires the rapid move­ment of the cam­era across the imag­ined span of com­po­si­tion, mak­ing use of the camera’s inabil­i­ty to hold the light still in dark­ness, the “lim­i­ta­tions” of the tech­nol­o­gy. I have long been inter­est­ed in abstrac­tion and fail­ure, in part inspired by my expe­ri­ence as a writer and by Samuel Beckett’s explo­ration of fail­ure and lan­guage in his work.

 
Tyler Dun­ston is a writer and visu­al artist. His poems can be found in Nar­ra­tive, South­west Review, Nim­rod, The Brook­lyn Review, and oth­er jour­nals. He is the author of the poet­ry chap­book Octaves, which was a final­ist for the Moon­stone Press Chap­book Con­test. His visu­al art has been fea­tured in a vari­ety of juried exhi­bi­tions, most recent­ly at the Gut­man Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michi­gan, and his visu­al poet­ry has appeared or is forth­com­ing in The Indi­anapo­lis Review and Strange Hym­nal. He received his MFA in poet­ry from Boston Uni­ver­si­ty and is a PhD can­di­date in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, where he serves as the poet­ry edi­tor for Michi­gan Quar­ter­ly Review.

On “Love Prodigal” + More

Interview / Traci Brimhall

 

Traci Brimhall

Edi­tor Brooke Har­ries: Traci Brimhall’s Love Prodi­gal explores states of feel­ing in close rela­tion­ships along­side tex­tures from the nat­ur­al world. Brimhall arranges images, facts, and allu­sions with a lyri­cism that soft­ens and star­tles; it is impos­si­ble to read her lines and sen­tences with­out notic­ing the rest­less music of sub­tle rep­e­ti­tion and allit­er­a­tion. These capa­cious poems prove that there are infi­nite ways to explore the many-sided nature of love. They are less inter­est­ed in pain and assign­ing blame than in the lumi­nous every­day world—and spaces with­in it—towards which the speak­er directs a rich life of the mind. In these spaces and stan­zas, love is always leav­ing, gone, or sim­mer­ing just out of frame. The book shows us that chal­leng­ing ideas sur­round­ing love is insep­a­ra­ble from being human: “—my heart // in its bone ken­nel, shak­ing, con­vinced it can hear you from / that far, from here, from this home I can­not live in or leave.”

Dur­ing our inter­view, Brimhall shared thoughts on mul­ti-dimen­sion­al truths, jux­ta­po­si­tions, metaphors, what gets to go in a poem, and why artists make art and writ­ers write.

 

BH: Light, includ­ing fire, is a con­stant theme in Love Prodi­gal. What new insights did you gain about the way you thought about love in its var­i­ous forms from putting this book togeth­er? Did you notice any new obses­sions, para­dox­es, or recur­ring words that the sub­ject magnetized?

TB: Ear­ly on in these poems I knew I hat­ed the phoenix. It’s such a stu­pid metaphor to some­one deep in their suf­fer­ing. It’s like the tox­ic pos­i­tiv­i­ty of ancient cryp­tids. But the more I dug into the actu­al his­to­ry, the more true the metaphor also became. I read a book on the cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the phoenix and found out all sorts of strange ori­gins, like in one the pyre isn’t a self-immo­la­tion but burn­ing its father and then climb­ing into the fire, which cre­at­ed the self-burn­ing cycle after that. How many of us feel like a part of us dies when a par­ent dies? And in anoth­er ver­sion the phoenix doesn’t start again as an egg but as a worm. When I found out that the c. ele­gans worm sur­vived the Colum­bia shut­tle break­ing up and burn­ing upon re-entry to the Earth’s atmos­phere I had anoth­er strange truth in the com­plex his­to­ry of the phoenix and its metaphors. I nev­er want the two-dimen­sion­al ver­sion of a truth. I want its whole, weird, grief-strick­en and wormy truth. One of the best parts of any obses­sion is get­ting to real­ize how gor­geous­ly com­plex the world is—how there’s always more to know, more to under­stand, more truth beneath the flat­tened out facts you learn.

 

BH: One won­der­ful fea­ture of your poems in Love Prodi­gal is their ground­ing in a con­crete and seem­ing­ly every­day world (of “mask­ing-tape Xs,” “the bot­tom of the fridge,” “brass bands and free boat rides,” “Lego bricks,” “machchi­atos and Ore­os,” “jeans on sale,” “mail-order lemon trees,” “choco­late sheet cake,” “your man­i­cure click­ing across piano keys,” “a patient copy­ed­it”) that allows for a clear depar­ture into vivid imag­in­ings of images often relat­ed to the world of science—specifically of the nat­ur­al world that has been stud­ied and recorded.

It is as if the poems move from one con­scious­ness to a dreami­er (yet more aca­d­e­m­ic) one, and this hap­pens quick­ly, not only from line to line, but from clause to clause. This move­ment empha­sizes the every­day expe­ri­ence of the imag­i­na­tion. Was a kind of real­ism a con­scious anchor when com­pos­ing these poems?

I used to think that putting an air­plane in a poem was putting some­thing wayyyy too con­tem­po­rary into verse. I want­ed trees and stars and things I believed to be time­less. But a) noth­ing is time­less, and b) all things can be the fit sub­ject of poet­ry, includ­ing Legos and Ore­os. Sure, I’m made of star dust, but I’m also star dust going to Kroger and binge­ing Net­flix. PLUS, I’m always on the look­out for ways for lan­guage to make inter­est­ing fric­tion in poems. Fic­tion has con­flict and plot to dri­ve the read­er, but for poet­ry, our sur­pris­es come with lan­guage and line break. I love fig­ur­ing out which lists to build or which adjective+noun pair strikes sparks to build some heat in a poem. So whether it’s high and low dic­tion next to each oth­er, philo­soph­i­cal mus­ings next to my Star­bucks order or the every­day next to the sub­lime, I’m look­ing for ten­sions and jux­ta­po­si­tions that will ener­gize the poem. Carl Jung said hold­ing oppo­sites with­out con­flict is the clos­est we come to the spir­i­tu­al, which I think is anoth­er ver­sion of Keats’ Neg­a­tive Capa­bil­i­ty. As the world becomes fric­tion­less and AI will give us all our answers and rein­force all our opin­ions, this is one of my favorite gifts of poetry—contradictory truths and pro­duc­tive fric­tions and not hav­ing to answer for any of it.

 

BH: Ear­ly in the book, the lines in the title poem, “What’s bro­ken can­not be / healed with any­thing but super­glue / and imag­i­na­tion. Still, let it be tend­ed to” read like instruc­tions for read­ing the col­lec­tion. Sim­i­lar­ly, “I’m ready for a love with hope in it—” from “Cold, Crazy, Bro­ken” also instructs us how to inter­pret the sen­tences and lines … pos­si­bly to see atten­tive­ness as a type of love and the imag­i­na­tive capac­i­ty as affec­tion for real­i­ty. How much did you think of an imag­ined read­er as you wrote and revised these poems?

TB: I usu­al­ly don’t think about a read­er at all as I draft. I’m still work­ing out the dif­fi­cul­ty of being a human in drafts zero, one, and two. But once I’m pol­ish­ing, I always think about the read­er as some­one I love. I want to be care­ful with how much I’m reveal­ing and care­ful with how I’m reveal­ing it. I want poems to be ugly and uncom­fort­able some­times because that’s what being a per­son is. But I also don’t want to play vic­tim in sit­u­a­tions I co-cre­at­ed or ask read­ers to hold trau­mas for me. So I hope I am reveal­ing some real and occa­sion­al­ly hard things about life as I am liv­ing it, but I also hope that I don’t hurt any­one with a poem. I hope they feel restored to them­selves in the end.

 

In a 2020 inter­view with Lisa Olstein, you shared that a favorite test to hear a poem’s music is to “read it back­wards line by line.” Love Prodi­gal fea­tures a sec­tion, “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Son­nets.” Each poem in the sequence con­tains a sat­is­fy­ing four­teen sen­tences. Excit­ing­ly, your debut book of essays, The Grief Artist, is just out this fall from Sara­bande Books. When you write prose, how do you deter­mine the right rhythm and sound for sen­tences? Is it dif­fer­ent from your poet­ry writ­ing process? 

Ooh, I love think­ing about sen­tences! W.B. Yeats said in his lat­er years that he didn’t revise any­more except towards a more pas­sion­ate syn­tax. I love the idea of becom­ing more and more in love with the sen­tence and all its pos­si­bil­i­ties. I do use some sim­i­lar poet­ic forms in both. For instance, you men­tioned “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Son­nets” in which each sec­tion of the essay is 14 sen­tences rather than 14 lines. The cou­plet titles can also be read across the top to cre­ate a more clas­sic rhymed son­net. There’s a prose son­net crown in The Grief Artist as well, but the sen­tences are much more essay­is­tic than poet­ic. I try to turn the dial away from the intense­ly poet­ic when I’m work­ing on essays. Of course, I can’t help myself (or I could, but why?), and I do let my sen­tences be a bit spell­bound by beau­ty some­times. But in poet­ry I’m singing more than say­ing, and in prose it’s the opposite.

 

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 Love Prodi­gal inter­ro­gat­ing these ideas? 

Per­haps it’s only a tes­ta­ment to my own life, but I feel that’s also worth wit­ness­ing. I think, for me, every poem is a ver­sion of prayer, by which I see it as a devo­tion, an act of atten­tion and inten­tion. To deeply see any­thing is one of life’s prin­ci­ple plea­sure (imo) and it’s also some­thing that was taught to me by oth­er poets. I am less alone when I pay atten­tion or read great poems or look at great art. And I am so glad. So glad so many artists make art and writ­ers write. And every­one who helped and helps keep my soul awake in this life. Tru­ly, what else is there besides distraction?

Traci Brimhall is a pro­fes­sor of cre­ative writ­ing at Kansas State Uni­ver­si­ty. She is the author of five col­lec­tions of poet­ry, includ­ing Love Prodi­gal (Cop­per Canyon, 2024). Her poems have appeared in pub­li­ca­tions such as The New York­er, The Nation, Ori­on, The New Repub­lic, Poet­ry, The New York Times Mag­a­zine, and The Atlantic. She’s received fel­low­ships from Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, the Nation­al Park Ser­vice, the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets, the Guggen­heim Muse­um, and Pur­due Library’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s cur­rent­ly the poet lau­re­ate for the State of Kansas.

On “No Longer at This Address” + More

Interview / Andrew Hemmert 

 

Andrew Hemmert

Andrew Hem­mert 

 

Edi­tor: Brooke Har­ries: Andrew Hemmert’s No Longer at This Address is a col­lec­tion of clear-voiced poems that focus on nat­ur­al, tech­no­log­i­cal, and per­son­al his­to­ry. Abound­ing in cou­plets, mov­ing from past to future then past again, with tense shifts that reflect qui­et hes­i­tan­cy and wist­ful skep­ti­cism, these poems invite us to oblique­ly engage with the mod­ern cat­a­stro­phe of inter­fer­ences to nature. They remind me of Emi­ly Dickinson’s order to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Imagery, root­ed in real­ism, shows a way of see­ing; “out­dat­ed phones” and rem­nants of nat­ur­al his­to­ry (“in a thick dis­place case,” / “the skull of a saber tooth tiger”) are both decid­ed­ly not thriv­ing. Yet delight­ful­ly, Hem­mert under­cuts jour­nal­is­tic seri­ous­ness with pun­ny images, such as an umbil­i­cal cord (in a poem fea­tur­ing phones), and a voice that is as wry as it is vul­ner­a­ble: “I no longer / have a cord, though once it was / the only way I ate.”

In our inter­view, Hem­mert shared about choos­ing dic­tion, the beau­ty of the world in ruins, and the nat­ur­al con­se­quence of attempt­ing to write on landscape.

 

I was drawn to “Like Stars, Like Small-Town Church­es.” In cou­plets that spread across three pages, it tells a sto­ry of dri­ving to Den­ver to inspect a house. Nature is blend­ed with the human domain, and the human-made world is anthro­po­mor­phized; an inter­state, “over­com­mit­ted,” is rem­i­nis­cent of the lan­guage of a time-con­strained young pro­fes­sion­al. Hawks “like traf­fic cam­eras, or like stars / above the cheap nativ­i­ty scenes / of small-town church­es” dri­ve home the point that humans have tam­pered with nature—perhaps at their spir­i­tu­al per­il. The final lines refer to church­es “we pass on the way home,” and they present a haunt­ing med­i­ta­tion on options pon­dered, of course, in hind­sight. The pos­si­bly fate-chang­ing turns in life, like choos­ing a new home or geo­graph­i­cal region, are trou­bled by the inter­re­la­tion­ships of nature and humanity.

There is a sparse lone­li­ness in all the poems in the col­lec­tion, yet they feel full, and for me, odd­ly com­fort­ing. Per­haps the pac­ing, how long one image is drawn out, is what caus­es the still­ness, makes scenes evocative.

What are your con­sid­er­a­tions, in pac­ing, when you’re writ­ing and revis­ing poems? What are the voic­es in your head say­ing when you’re decid­ing things?

The first voice in my head is always music, so to speak. I’m writ­ing descrip­tive­ly, but I’m also writ­ing in such a way that the sounds in the words are con­nect­ing to each oth­er. There’s a phrase that Judy Jor­dan taught me called a son­ic lad­der, and by that she meant using sounds that you’ve already imple­ment­ed in a pri­or line to help deter­mine what words will appear in the fol­low­ing line. You’re going fur­ther into the draft on the “rungs” of echo­ing musi­cal­i­ty, so to speak. You arrive at some fun and sur­pris­ing images doing this, focus­ing on match­ing asso­nance and con­so­nance as opposed to choos­ing dead-on diction.

As for pac­ing, I real­ly don’t think about it dur­ing the ini­tial com­po­si­tion. I’m just try­ing to chase inter­est­ing music and sur­pris­ing images. In revi­sion, how­ev­er, I vary syn­tax for dynamism by chang­ing sen­tence length and chang­ing the place­ment of prepo­si­tion­al phras­es in sen­tences. This is a great way to impart a giv­en momen­tum in your poem.

 

In the tit­u­lar and final poem, “No Longer at This Address,” the lines “In the face of destruc­tion / it’s use­ful to keep a run­ning list / of all the good things” offer a pos­i­tive prac­ti­cal tip for read­ers, some­thing a CBT ther­a­pist might sug­gest for sum­mon­ing hope in chal­leng­ing times. How do you bal­ance the neg­a­tive feel­ings that arise when writ­ing about our dan­ger­ous time and the signs of dam­age to nature with some­thing like won­der or hope?

I don’t bal­ance it well! It’s psy­cho­log­i­cal whiplash, but that’s just a nat­ur­al con­di­tion of being aware of your sur­round­ings, aware of the world and what we’re doing to it. I’m con­stant­ly bowled over by the beau­ty of the world, and con­stant­ly bereft at the ways in which we’ve ruined it, are still ruin­ing it.

Just this last week, I was dri­ving through Christ­mas FL on the way to the East Coast. We’d be in deep cool shade in heavy trees, oaks hang­ing low over the road and thick walls of pines on either side. And then harsh light would come through, and we’d be pass­ing anoth­er new hous­ing devel­op­ment. It’s scorched earth, the cleared brush and trees in smol­der­ing piles. The stark scaf­folds of new fast hous­es. It works like that. I’m dri­ving along and I’m see­ing beau­ti­ful things and I’m see­ing the destruc­tion of beau­ti­ful things in rapid suc­ces­sion. I’m most­ly chas­ing that feel­ing in my poems. And there’s no ther­a­piz­ing that feel­ing away.

The hope comes in the idea that one’s depic­tion of the world might cause some­one else to recon­sid­er the flip­pant way they’ve engaged with the world. It also helps, I’ve found, to pick an envi­ron­men­tal action group and send them mon­ey! I’d rec­om­mend the Flori­da Wildlife Cor­ri­dor Foun­da­tion.

 

In a 2022 inter­view with Thomas Whyte, you iden­ti­fied recur­ring themes and obses­sions: “cli­mate change, work, what it feels like to belong to a place, how dis­tance changes belong­ing.” Have these evolved, or have you added any new considerations? 

That’s still the gist of it! Since that inter­view, I’ve added a few more places to my expand­ing poet­ic pic­ture of home: San­ta Fe, the Rocky Moun­tains, Cape Canaver­al. I think there’s always going to be the ques­tion of place ver­sus home in the con­stel­la­tion of belong­ing in my work. And our envi­ron­men­tal sit­u­a­tion hasn’t got­ten any bet­ter since 2022, so that’s unfor­tu­nate­ly going to con­tin­ue to be a fac­tor as long as I’m keyed in on place as a sub­ject. I’ve been writ­ing a lit­tle more late­ly about men­tal ill­ness, though that’s prob­a­bly been in the work all along. The new work just touch­es on depres­sion and ADHD more explicitly.

 

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 No Longer at This Address inter­ro­gat­ing these ideas?

I appre­ci­ate that y’all give your writ­ers an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­vide an account with their work. It’s nice to have a lit­tle space to pro­vide con­text or an adden­dum. The nat­ur­al con­se­quence of try­ing to write one place or land­scape in full is being hon­est re: the fac­tors at play in the degra­da­tion of said place or landscape.

In No Longer at This Address, I couldn’t write hon­est­ly about the grass­lands and the moun­tains that encom­pass my new home with­out look­ing at those things that threat­en my home. That means writ­ing about the wors­en­ing wild­fire threat, the dis­ap­pear­ance of native flo­ra and fau­na, and the bil­lion­aires build­ing rock­ets to escape the world they’ve wound­ed. My tes­ti­mo­ny would be incom­plete with­out that, and that’s why those things appear in No Longer at This Address.

Andrew Hem­mert is the author of No Longer at This Address (Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press), Bless­ing the Exoskele­ton(Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press), and Saw­grass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared in var­i­ous mag­a­zines includ­ing Cop­per Nick­el, The Keny­on Review, The Mis­souri Review, New Ohio Review, and The South­ern Review. He lives in Thorn­ton, Colorado.

from The Immemorable

Poetry / Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

 

:: from The Immemorable ::

II.

Look, the original workday was short: make a distinction. Rest.

You don’t even have to proofread. The sky overcast, the planet’s various waters

so still they could be fields of ice. The idea of virtue and vice traces its origin

to nowhere, as the world does, dissolution being in fact the beginning,

rather than the end, of everything. Around the end of the sixth century, Pope

Gregory I combined two deadly sins into one: tristitia, or sadness, and acedia, or sloth.

When you are idle, you become sad. Or perhaps when you are sad, you become

idle—in either case, the threat of cessation like the minotaur trapped in the

center of its maze. Sloth, the sin of the strike. For what is duty, now, that holy

mood that sloth is said to supplant? The duty to the commute. To the gas

station and the insurance bill. To the shipping fee and the monthly fee to eliminate

the shipping fee. To emails. To pore shrinkage and the large gym and the

vomit which means you’re pushing it. To the diary in which you write “self-care”

and “me-time.” To the me-time coated in nail polish, to the woman now at your feet,

now anointing your head, to the military rows of recliners covered in plastic. Dereliction

of duty: to turn away from that which rules you. Having found itself faced

with the featureless world, God had no instructions. We are not so fortunate,

and the only sin that will still reliably kill you is that of slowly shaking your head.



IV.

The multiplicity of languages foreclosed the possibility of a universal name. A reminder,

if you’re the believing sort, not to get too cocky. Now we have girl bosses. Now

we have influencers. Don’t get me wrong: nostalgia’s a hunk of pyrite, and our rulers

have always been incompetent. But you cannot deny that we are building again towards

the firmament, scraping up coral and mahogany and the earth’s very guts to do

so. And what are we saying to one another as we scoop the entrails out of swine

to make them better for eating? We say “deliverables.” We say “innovation.” We say

“private equity.” In goes the flesh, out comes this tangle of saw-toothed nothing.

The curse of Babel was not the division of speech into French, Ibgo, Mandarin,

Russian, etc. It was to put into our mouths words like “synergy.” Like “police.”

The true name of the woodpecker belongs to the immemorable. The very ground

that holds us and the weight of our putrefying monuments has a name contained only

in the morass prior to the divine. To even apprehend the idea of that trace, one must

study and sink into mourning. To mourn, one must become a vessel for a cold wind,

wash oneself in bile. The ritual will not change after the abolition of grief’s middle

managers. It will instead simply become more available, and in the collectivity

of our slow ablutions, our respite from the tyranny of joy, we may sense that behind

the transparent wing of a dragonfly is something other than the objects that lie beyond,

something else in its shimmering. We will never grasp it, and it is our only hope.



V. 

I forget exactly what happened on the fifth day, but it doesn’t matter: we are

nevertheless living in it, a kind of global Wednesday. We are tired, we are punished

unrelentingly for being tired. Asked about my recent accomplishments, about my

contributions to the community, I open my hands and out tumble several weeds

made of fur, a browser tab, fourteen deleted text messages. Another sent over and

over again. My latest initiative is eating until I feel sick, so that the sick feeling that

attaches to me like a barnacle might be said to have a cause. I am thrilled to announce

that I am this year’s recipient of the cloud of dust that remains after a tremendous

implosion. The light that filters through has a slow quality. A quality that should be

tawny, but is somehow a thin and unwell yellowish-green. The sins that are not sloth

have formed a path of nonwoven fibers to the next absolute flood. Do not tell me

to simply love my facial features; how on earth is even the most active doer of good deeds

to keep up with the pace of capital’s accumulation? Today at the lake, what I thought

was a distant piece of plastic flotsam turned out to be an enormous dead fish, belly

shockingly bloated, four translucent fins pointing, slapstick, straight up.

I thought it would take forever to reach the shore. It arrived in minutes.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

This long poem is part of a larg­er project on the his­to­ry and tropol­o­gy of melan­choly. This piece comes at the very end of the col­lec­tion, and is one that is in explic­it dia­logue with David Kishik’s remark­able The Book of Shem, which is an anno­tat­ed het­ero­dox trans­la­tion of the first book of Gen­e­sis. I, per­son­al­ly, am not reli­gious. But I was absolute­ly floored by Kishik’s ren­der­ing of God as a type of melan­choly void, a void after which human­i­ty is pat­terned. In response to this, I want­ed to try and form a pic­ture of the ways in which our cre­ation myths over­lap with, or indeed form, our notions of affect and tem­pera­ment. Part of what’s going on in this poem is a hard look at what we use to fill the voids that we are: con­sumerism, cap­i­tal­ist fren­zy, impe­ri­al­ism. We turn a cer­tain kind of rapa­cious­ness into virtue; we prize a very spe­cif­ic wide-eyed hap­pi­ness. The well­ness indus­try doesn’t real­ly want us to slow down at all; it wouldn’t be an indus­try if it did. Melan­choly, as an affect that is by def­i­n­i­tion char­ac­ter­ized by slowness—slowness almost to stu­por, but also asso­ci­at­ed since Aris­to­tle with spe­cial intel­lec­tu­al capability—is seen in the mod­ern West not only as a dis­abil­i­ty but also as a type of sin. What if it were in fact one of the only virtues capa­ble of appre­hend­ing the gas ped­al of moder­ni­ty, the utter unsus­tain­abil­i­ty of the pace at which the world forces us to labor, to accu­mu­late, to live?

Kim­ber­ly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and lit­er­ary crit­ic. She is the author of A Brief His­to­ry of Fruit, win­ner of the Akron Prize for Poet­ry from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Akron Press, Ani­mals I Nev­er Saw, win­ner of the 2025 Flume Press chap­book award, and BETWEEN, win­ner of the New Women’s Voic­es Chap­book Prize from Fin­ish­ing Line Press. An Amer­i­can liv­ing in Cana­da, she teach­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ottawa.

Beyond Heaven’s Gate

Poetry / I Echo (b. Chris Baah) 

 

:: Beyond Heaven’s Gate ::

The pistol-butt against the side of the man’s head, 
I fell with whatever they said walked into perdition,
Pulled a race out, & called it a deliverance. Brother,
Who will teach me how to cry for the secrets
The beach-wind opens? The fork knows I have
Asked it to clear a way between anger & flesh.
Mistaken these tears for mango juice, I deprive
The ground of what is too great for discernment.
The woman I love will give penance for my life.
There is no thanksgiving necessary to uphold
This ritual of life—or is it death? I am pulling a jar
From hospice. Pulling the pigs from the ocean.
What man am I to give up all the ways to save you,
My brother? In the mirror that reveals judgement,
For an hour, I ask if truly I have ever understood
The ways of men. My brother, evicting my father
Like the dogs do a reckless digestion. A terrible,
Terrible exhaustion, he called it lightning, called
It enchantment, called it exorcism, called it a cry
Away from heaven’s gate. But we all approach
The truth in the same way we meet at the eye
Of a wound. Slow entry, then a long devastation.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

It is dif­fi­cult to give an account of my work. I do not like to read to an audi­ence. Because I would rather much hear & see how the poem holds itself in anoth­er per­son. This does not mean I am more con­cerned about the read­er than I am about pro­duc­ing the poems. Not near­ly. The motives of my work are per­son­al, the exe­cu­tion is not. Ask me, I am still writ­ing to save myself. & about my poet­ics, I am pulling from a place that is still vul­ner­a­ble & ulti­mate­ly free—to myself as a boy raised some­where in Port Har­court, Nige­ria, & to the man I am now in Vir­ginia. I can talk to you about my con­cern for the line end­ings of my poems, or my deci­sion to begin each line with a cap­i­tal let­ter. But tru­ly, the only absolute is what I seek from the poems is a dis­cus­sion teth­ered to ten­der­ness & mas­culin­i­ty. I am for­ev­er held by Ethel­bert E. Miller’s “Black Men Are Pre­cious.” Before the poem begins, I remind myself of those last lines from Bri­an Gyamfi’s “Prog­e­ny of Wounds” : “do you still remem­ber where it hurts?”

I Echo (b. Chris Baah) is an MFA stu­dent at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty. A Ghana­ian-Niger­ian, he is the author of “Among the Secret Things,” forth­com­ing in the African Poet­ry Book Fund’s New-Gen­er­a­tion African Poets Series. His oth­er writ­ing has been pub­lished / is forth­com­ing in Callaloo, Mud­room, The Good Life Review, and elsewhere.

It was somehow fitting to lose my virginity

Poetry / Simeon Berry 

The Account, Berry, FA 2026Down­load

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

I find it iron­ic that I am pas­sion­ate­ly attached to line breaks (as my friend, Sara Wain­scott says, every­one has a the­o­ry about them, and every­one is wrong), yet I have pub­lished two books with the min­i­mum amount of line breaks required to sus­tain human life. Sev­en of my nine man­u­scripts (two pub­lished, three liv­ing, four dead) have start­ed out lin­eat­ed, but my fig­u­ra­tion tends to be so elab­o­rate that any addi­tion­al com­plex­i­ty is counter-pro­duc­tive. Richard Wilbur said that the strength of the genie comes from being in the bot­tle. I am not a For­mal­ist (and every poem I’ve writ­ten in meter has failed, despite tak­ing an under­grad forms work­shop twice), but I am com­ing to the grudg­ing real­iza­tion that I may gen­er­al­ly work best inside the square bot­tle of a para­graph, rather than the deco­rous aer­a­tion of the stan­za. Per­haps this is due to much pre­fer­ring rac­quet­ball over ten­nis. In the for­mer, you get to rebound off walls and cal­cu­late as many baroque angles as you want. The ball even­tu­al­ly comes to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion, because it is cir­cum­scribed, and there’s only so much ener­gy avail­able. Con­verse­ly, in ten­nis, the cos­mic void waits on every side, and the sin­gle vec­tor is unfor­giv­able. As with exis­tence, lim­its help you stay focused on the human.

Sime­on Berry won the Nation­al Poet­ry Series for his first col­lec­tion of poet­ry, Amper­sand Revis­it­ed (Fence Books), and his sec­ond book of poet­ry, Mono­graph (Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia Press). He has been an Asso­ciate Edi­tor for Ploughshares and won a Mass­a­chu­setts Cul­tur­al Coun­cil Indi­vid­ual Artist Grant, and his work has appeared in AGNI, Black War­rior Review, Black­bird, DIAGRAM, The Iowa Review, and many oth­er journals.

2 Poems

Poetry / Conor Bracken

 

:: Hodad Visits a Museum ::

	
Magritte’s La Reproduction Interdite

You stand in front of the painting and look
at the back of the head of a man who is looking
at the back of his own head. 

Reflexively you smooth 
an historical cowlick down.
(“‘Think of a table,’ he said,

‘when you’re not there.’”)
The world, its oyster 
forks and traffic cones,

brassieres and thumbscrews 
and geostatic satellites
locked on targets we want to sort

into analytic categories of enemy or just
collateral—it all rattles
in the junk drawer of your mind

so you limit yourself to the painting.
When you’re not with yourself,
what are you? 

The lacquer-headed subject?
His reflection? You could be 
the shape between them,

a wobbly vase of air
too weak to hold itself
to any material account.

You’re not the mantel, not 
the mirror gulping parallactic 
at the world and gleaming more! 

At best you are the book:
simple, half-legible, too short 
to see in the mirror the title on your spine.

All night ransacking your pages for
whatever feels like
your name. Like tiger, maybe,

or Grampus.
Pirogue, perhaps
or labyrinth. 

Possibly 
mutineer.

:: Hodad Explains Veterans’ Day to His Five-Year-Old  ::

In her grandfather’s hand-
me-down station wagon
her great-grandfather’s CD of 
Best All-Time Marches blares 
John Philip Sousa’s “Semper 

Fidelis.” Snow 
whirls and stalls, gyrates
and stalls, pulling plate-sized 
leaves off the sycamores and
pasting them where they’ll 

rot into feed for the branches
they fell from. We are 
driving to school. It feels
inaccurate to say “John Philip 
Sousa is playing” when he

died almost a century ago,
but these notes, their 
arrangement, the interlocking 
crescendi and dramatic crashes
are his. A system and sequence 

of sound but not the sound 
itself. I turn the sousaphones down
so I can hear her in the backseat
asking if her grandfather, her
great grandfathers did “anything 

bad while they were 
in war.” The trees can’t help
what they eat, but they share
what they get with who needs it
most via mycorrhizal networks,

symbiotic complexes composed
of fungus encasing root tips in hyphal
sheaths. I think of the friend shipping 
bottles of iced tea to buddies he
knew from Basic in Fallujah

after filling them with contraband whiskey. 
No one got caught or felt
bad, because this economic rhizome whose 
fruiting body we call a state has always 
loved the label more than the contents.

For instance: in the car she is 
a passenger. At school she becomes 
a student. And in between, in the snow, she is 
not a child running, backpack bouncing, 
her friends’ names written on the air

in cloudy gouts of breath—she is
a heat signature, in-
cinerating snowflakes the world 
will never hold again.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

These poems fol­low, or are in the voice/headspace of, an alter ego I’ve named “hodad.” Though a hodad is a guy who embod­ies the “all the gear and no idear” ethos, with more tan and lin­go than any innate surf­ing abil­i­ty, the per­sona and the poems have lit­tle to do with surf­ing and much more to do with per­for­mance, machis­mo, pos­tur­ing, and a hol­low­ness in the mid­dle that might be spir­i­tu­al or might be what makes music pos­si­ble. Maybe both. In any case, it’s a way for me to grab hold of and wres­tle with the mil­i­tarism and reflex­ive nation­al­ism that my upbring­ing instilled in me, thanks to my nuclear and extend­ed family’s impli­ca­tion in US gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary roles, and to exor­cize it so that I do not incul­cate some­thing sim­i­lar in my children.

Hav­ing been a father for sev­en years, it’s become very clear to me that chil­dren are not inher­ent­ly or intu­itive­ly adapt­ed to the built and liv­ing world. At the same time, the world itself is fine­ly-tuned for doing vio­lence to inat­ten­tive or unguard­ed kids. As some­one who is dis­po­si­tion­al­ly inclined toward com­pro­mise, con­sen­sus, and har­mo­ny, and who sociopo­lit­i­cal­ly finds it impor­tant, as a white-pass­ing cis-het male, to cede space and not speak over or dic­tate to oth­ers, I’ve learned that a mea­sure of asser­tion, in instruct­ing my kids or pro­tect­ing them from dan­gers, is often essen­tial. And so I’ve been hav­ing to recon­fig­ure my expec­ta­tions and per­for­mance of mas­culin­i­ty to accom­mo­date the real­i­ties of par­ent­ing and father­hood, while at the same time rec­og­niz­ing how eas­i­ly assertive­ness, in the ser­vice of secu­ri­ty, can bloom into the kind of sur­veil­lant, sup­pres­sive prac­tices the US and oth­er mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al extrac­tive cap­i­tal­is­tic nations use on their own citizens.

The empire begins in the home and moves out­ward. I saw this in my own child­hood, and in the child­hoods of friends, fam­i­ly, acquain­tances, and oth­ers. These hodad poems are try­ing to iden­ti­fy and root out tendencies—inborn, learned, or some­thing else—that, if nour­ished, could help prop­a­gate the empire. They also want to dis­en­tan­gle the indi­vid­ual from the nation that wants to swal­low them, so as to hold, and maybe pity, or maybe soothe, them, because like mas­culin­i­ty, empire harms all whom it touch­es. This is not to exon­er­ate or con­done, but to remind us that we will all ben­e­fit when we find our way past it.

Conor Brack­en is a poet and trans­la­tor. His lat­est trans­la­tions are of Jean D’Amérique’s Work­shop of Silence (Van­der­bilt, 2025) and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s The Bur­ial and oth­er short prose (UVA, 2026), and his sec­ond book of poems, All-Amer­i­can Dad (Brid­well), is due out fall 2026. Recent work can be found in Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review, Azon­aL, Cincin­nati Review, the Cleve­land Review of Books, Coma, Cop­per Nick­el, mer­cury firs, Sixth Finch, and On the Sea­wall. He teach­es at the Cleve­land Insti­tute of Art.

2 Poems

Poetry / Magnus Briar

 

:: How Natural It Looks ::

	
Lepus townsendii, the label reads, though the ink omits
the hands, omits October, the razor cleaving
the belly seam without a tremor. Anchored
at the hip, nickel rod threaded through where the pelvis
had grated against the socket. Clinched
at the jugular notch, where she [methodical, deliberate,
the final preparator under the lamp] tamped excelsior
into the chest cavity until the hide stretched taut.

Ten years since the borax dry-cured the fat. Ten years
since the steel calipers measured the nostrils to the bone,
calibrated for display, declared clean.
A slower absolution. Every reliquary needs a skin
that stopped moving. Suspended in the leap
that isn’t a leap anymore, the armature
setting the spine at forty-five degrees, mid-air forever.
Glass eyes don’t dilate.

The docent says look at the pelt, how natural, her breath
fogging the pane. Beneath the surface, fine-gauge wire
binds the ribs to the cedar block. Count the pins in the ears.
Where the jawline met the neck, a gap of three millimeters
where the hide declined a close:
clamped, clamped, clamped, the sanctuary vibrating
with caught muscle, the wire taut, the wire—

:: Last Call at the Wagon Wheel ::

 

Neon buzzes B-flat, off-key with the jukebox
mangling the song about rivers and rings again for the taxidermy elk.
The bartender polishes a glass down to a razor edge.

A Diet Coke breeds its own frost against the laminate
beside the longnecks. Salt-lick reek, spilled Bud,
perfume of a peach three days dead in a leather purse.

My hip against the bar rail, chin tipped.
The disco ball mints legal tender out of dust, throwing
cold coins across every face angled elsewhere, and the one angled here.

Her voice idles on three cylinders. Her mouth, a salt mine.
She observes me with the slow rot of a fuse.
God, to be torn open by the local jaw, her palm weighing at my lumbar,
two rites donning each other’s skin.

The bridge hits [I’d drive through fire, baby] and the room sings it back,
a choir of wet Carhartts. Sequins and sawdust.
A cowboy hat passed as a collection plate.
An ex weeping over a basket of crinkle-cut fries, tending the manger.

Last call. The bartender flips the chrome legs skyward,
kills the neon letter by letter: WAGON, then WHEEL,
leaving the buzzing O to swallow the ceiling.

Out in the lot, prairie sky stretched, a black-velvet-Elvis portrait.
Her kiss is a wire live in the dirt.
Behind us, the sign confessing O, O, O into the bed of an idling Ford.

I taste ice and Marlboro and ten years of teeth clicked shut.
My ribs un-latch.
A jaw un-domesticated steps out of the sternum,
chews the ignition keys, and eats the dark whole.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

The body is an object in per­pet­u­al motion. Whether under­go­ing med­ical and gen­der trans­for­ma­tion, decom­pos­ing in the dying orbit of a satel­lite, or nav­i­gat­ing a bar sober, it moves. This is the cen­tral pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of these poems: explor­ing those moments when rigid language—scientific, archival, or procedural—suddenly snaps under the pres­sure of intense human emotion.

These two poems explore dis­place­ment and preser­va­tion with­out offer­ing a reas­sur­ing or tidy neat­ness. In How Nat­ur­al It Looks, taxi­dermy is exam­ined as a vio­lent litur­gy of con­tain­ment: a shad­ow-visu­al for trans sur­vival, sur­gi­cal alter­ation, and the exis­ten­tial dread of being “declared clean.”

Last Call at the Wag­on Wheel shifts rad­i­cal­ly into a meta­mor­phic state gov­erned by dream log­ic. I want­ed to write about queer desire and sobri­ety, two themes close to my heart, by set­ting the scene in a small-town bar at clos­ing time, a moment when the atmos­phere phys­i­cal­ly changes around the body.

Across both pieces, as in much of my work, I aim for a fusion of the region­al and the myth­ic, the tech­ni­cal and the sur­re­al, the com­plex and the tender.

Mag­nus Bri­ar (they/them) is a poet based in Win­nipeg, Cana­da. Their work blends the region­al and the myth­ic, explor­ing themes of dis­place­ment, grief, and recov­ery. Their poet­ry has been accept­ed into Funic­u­lar, Show­case, Coun­ty Lines, and others.

Zenith

Poetry / Garrett J. Brown

 

:: Zenith ::

	
As the demand for home audio systems grew in the 1950s and 1960s, 
Zenith expanded its product line to include stereo consoles. 
These were large, furniture-like cabinets that typically housed 
a radio tuner, a turntable for vinyl records, and sometimes a tape deck.
—Stereoconsole.com

1.	 ARK



                                       Remove the gilded idols struck
                                       in bowling stride & the dreamhouse

where a loose Barbie arm rattles
among boardgame dice on the lam, jellied bracelet

still hooped around her drinking-straw wrist.

                                                                 Slide back
the varnished lid, inhale wood hot-wired warm,

              & taste the trickling metal
             as the frictionless bass

                               slides, rattles your ribs,
                               electrifies every arm hair. The ancients

claimed god would topple any sky-spiked spindle,
but we know the diamond stylus

           is surgical.
           Precise.

Can be dusted clean with a kiss, can prick
                                                  your fingerprint’s groove—lick
                                                  frets from the friction & scratch.

 



2.	 LOGO



The zee sizzled under my finger, lightning
stitched into the twill weave grill,

as if for one bulb-popping moment it illuminated


a future skyway jammed

              with flying Chevrolets where robot shoulders
slink cold & chrome,		& we’re all enslaved by eyes

shortwave blue, copper lashes sparking, fluttering.


                                                     But the truth inside:

a spindle jutting like a tower from the grooved platter’s rim,
the azimuth’s curve measured in degrees,

             spin in rpms. In Old English a record
             only circled in the skull & the scop

                         carried the word, mnemonics
                         gripping the bolt of god. Geometrically,


you carry your zenith with you.




3.	APOGEE



Burnout—thrusters sputter & it’s high tide
on vestibular shores, cilia submerged	
	

weightless & you’re		free



                                               falling where the hawk drifts



			          hollow-boned & clouds
                      but a dampness in your beard

while ground control ticks the seconds
	your bones will stretch

				between velvet oceans,
                                & a not-quite-night


blue & for a moment you’re convinced your momentum
must surely exceed the greedy tug


                                       of this sickle, this metal crescent world.




4.	CAMELOT



                  Perhaps it would have been better
to go out under the inevitable

                                                      mushroom cloud

             Chubby Checkering at the fallout shelter sock hop,
brains abuzz with century-old Twinkies

                                       & waiting for the jukebox to retune
                                                   the fried planet. Instead


	                       our rocket ship convertibles
		                        were soldered into failing

orbits like a schoolyard carnival ride

                       & a brooding carnie cut the power
                 lifted the bar & sent us into the dusk’s weak light, feet


wobbly on the flattened grass, squinting
                          into pink clouds for fairy floss towers.




5.	REENTRY



                                      Eventually the scythe of creation drags on
                         our animal mass
      & even in decay there is pride



                                      in having sunk Mont Blanc,
	                  in knowing god didn’t want us
feathering such thin air & so we’ll hit



	                             the troposphere
                      with an it-was-all-worth-it grin
welcome the wet & warm



                                    wax down our backs
	          our know-it-all children breaking
above the Indian Ocean as seagulls leisurely



		     gyre over the splashdown.


6.	GARDEN



We all believed it was a path back
to fiber optic meadows, the tall glass 


so smooth, so flesh-
		                    like our bare feet
could bend the collars to the crown


& the blades would sizzle purple
& cherry between our toes, faces


awash with synthetic wings & the fruit
                         on that frontier would be thick


with code, haptics quaking
        at the lumbering mammoth, at the cats


around our feet rendered
                                  in resolutions so high


we can spy the dilation
                      that telegraphs the spring


& we’d finally walk as gods among our machines.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

This poem began when my moth­er gave my wife and me her old con­sole stereo cab­i­net for our new house. Retriev­ing it from her base­ment was a kind of exca­va­tion, buried as it was under box­es of pre­served memen­tos from my fam­i­ly: bowl­ing tro­phies, board games, dolls and action fig­ures. My moth­er received the stereo for her 16th birth­day, which would have been Novem­ber, 1965, and it was a fix­ture in my child­hood liv­ing room well into the 1980s. I played my very first albums, a Sesame Street record and a record­ing of the Lit­tle Engine that Could, on that stereo, a brass arm hold­ing the stacked 33s and drop­ping the next one to be played onto the turntable. The ark metaphor seemed apt, both because of the cab­i­net shape, but also due to the way a radio chan­nels invis­i­ble voic­es from the sky. I want­ed to cap­ture the aes­thet­ic of that mid-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy: elec­tric­i­ty not sealed in plas­tic and glass, but trick­ling behind wood and fab­ric, the shock of touch­ing a met­al knob when your stock­ing feet have trudged through shag car­pet. While my mother’s stereo is a Mag­navox, Zenith bet­ter fit the poem’s cen­tral ques­tion: Is there a tech­no­log­i­cal zenith? What if we’ve passed it and are already on the decline? And how will the zenith or decline feel?

The sec­ond sec­tion admit­ted­ly gets a bit abstract as the poem delves into mythol­o­gy and math—the light­ning zee in the Zenith logo evok­ing both Zeus but also Christ as the logos of God, ref­er­ences to the geo­met­ri­cal notions of zenith and azimuth that I hope set up the rock­et launch metaphor in sec­tion three. The Camelot sec­tion is there to con­jure the ide­al­ized Amer­i­ca of the Kennedy and the space race era—one pos­si­ble zenith. I hope that Mont Blanc in the Reen­try sec­tion evokes Shel­ley and the unfor­giv­ing pow­er of nature and phys­i­cal real­i­ty. It increas­ing­ly strikes me how our cur­rent dreams of tech­nol­o­gy seek to elim­i­nate the body (think Sam Alt­man pay­ing Nec­tome to pre­serve his brain for dig­i­tal upload­ing) and how juve­nile such projects are.

The poem ulti­mate­ly ends with a vision of that imag­ined Gar­den of Eden—the dig­i­tal par­adise where sen­sa­tion is pre­served and the body tran­scend­ed. The final line, writ­ten almost a decade ago in the ear­li­est draft of what would even­tu­al­ly become this poem, has only got­ten more poignant for me over the years as talk of AI gods dis­plac­ing human­i­ty becomes more com­mon and our 21st cen­tu­ry tech bros smug­ly ignore the les­son of humanity’s old­est myths: seek­ing the pow­er of a god always ends in slavery.

Gar­rett J. Brown is the author of Man­na Sift­ing (Bri­ary Creek Press, 2009), Cubi­cles (Fin­ish­ing Line Press, 2014) and Galileo in the Ueck­er Seats (Match Fac­to­ry Edi­tions, forth­com­ing). His poet­ry and cre­ative non­fic­tion have appeared or is upcom­ing in Tri­Quar­ter­ly, Black War­rior Review, Pas­sages North, The Account, Broad­kill Review, Wash­ing­ton Writ­ers Pub­lish­ing House Writes! and Beyond Words Mag­a­zine. He coor­di­nates the Cre­ative Writ­ing pro­gram at Anne Arun­del Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege and lives in a Bal­ti­more row­house with mar­ble steps and a defunct stereo cab­i­net in the din­ing room.

2 Poems

Poetry / Stevie Edwards

 

:: Upon Failing to Pack Enough Latuda for a Month-Long Writing Residency in Portugal ::


It’s loud in here!      The tambourine tapping to the beat of
				                     Do you remember not remembering
	      the last drunk night? The one that made you
stop drinking?		     How small vole prey you were
	      at the hotel bar, at the liquor store? How lucky
		            you were to survive 
with your pelt intact?
I’m thinking about getting thin	     again
		        and growing out my hair.     It’s our last chance
	to be hot, my friend says on the group chat
		          where I am the only not-mother.
I’m thinking about how weight loss drugs can make 
		        your hair fall out in clumps.     What will I do
	       if I look at the shower drain and there it is?
All my youth and beauty clogging the drain.  I am trying to find 

a cruelty-free tinted moisturizer with sunscreen
			                 to stop the progress of time dragging
	        its talons across my cheeks
		             ethically. There are so many things
	        I cannot stop.  Like the panic-freeze
		                 that seizes me whenever I think of 
a steering wheel, which keeps me 
a pedestrian in this too-fast life.
							                                         And, what if 
my husband gets esophageal cancer
like his father did	      and someone needs to drive him
	           to appointments  	        for chemo or radiation or whatever
and I’m just this dumb dead fish
			                   who can’t do anything but float
on the surface of living?	          Who signed me up	
		                 for all this responsibility?
	   Wasn’t it nice when I used to get lost	 in the night’s hours
		         and nobody expected me anywhere before
			                noon? Puking in the great Ivy League bathrooms
	    before explaining my syllabus to a class at 3 PM
wearing my nice polka dot dress from the thrift store.
		          I used to pick at my hangnails while I lectured
until one day I ran out of the classroom
	      a fountain bursting with blood. 	 I wrapped my thumb
		            in a wad of toilet paper and went on talking
	      about concrete language. 		           Last night my friends poured
		             red wine 	        local from Portugal	   in glass juice 
cups in my living room	        and I could smell it 	    from across 

the coffee table 	                        and wanted to take in its tannins         wanted it to press 
              the pause button	        deep in my cerebrum’s 
gray grooves.	    But I filled my cup with tap water
						                             like the responsible woman
I am supposed to be.

:: Midsized Meltdown ::

First came the author photos that made me sob
over how puffy my torso looked,
my arms sloppy like the sculptor
hadn’t finished chiseling the muscles.
Then, I asked my love, if I should spend
$250 a month for the new miracle weight loss drug
carving celebrities into skeletons,
and he said yes. What I wanted him to say
was I love your folds and rolls,
the hills you’ve grown in the safety
of this love, how you fill yourself up to the brim
with coconut curries and crispy tofu,
how you aren’t starving, like when you staggered
on a sea of wine for dinner and no bread
to sop-up the storm. And maybe he meant
I should do what I wish with my body
and our shared checking account. But what
I heard was disappear. Become a sliver
of yourself, a woman more worthy
of a glass slipper. Skip supper.
I picture my grandmother with her grapefruit
each morning, which I can’t eat
because they magnify the effects
of antipsychotics. It was the antidepressants,
first Zoloft and then Lexapro,
that ballooned me. I’d been wedding-dress-thin,
and then the pandemic drew heavy drapes
over my joy, and a pill each night opened them
but redrew my edges. Is it wrong to want
an injection that smooths my stomach
and thighs, reshapes me taut and new?

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

“Upon Fail­ing to Pack Enough Latu­da for a Month-Long Writ­ing Res­i­den­cy in Por­tu­gal”: Dur­ing the sum­mer of 2025, I had a month-long writ­ing res­i­den­cy with Buin­ho Cre­ative Hub in Messe­jana, Por­tu­gal. While this was a very pro­duc­tive time, toward the end of my res­i­den­cy, I real­ized that I had not packed enough of my bipo­lar med­ica­tion, Latu­da. I had to ration the pills for the last week of the res­i­den­cy, which caused me great men­tal dis­tress, which is chron­i­cled in this poem.

“Mid­sized Melt­down”: This poem is about how my husband’s like­ly well-inten­tioned answer to whether or not I should take a weight loss med­ica­tion caused me to spi­ral as some­body who has dealt with a lot of body image issues since puber­ty. Over the pan­dem­ic, I went on a series of anti­de­pres­sants, which caused me to gain about fifty pounds. I was unhap­py with how I looked but also felt a lot of shame about the prospect of turn­ing to weight loss med­ica­tion. Also, as some­body who wants to believe in body pos­i­tiv­i­ty and believes that bod­ies of all shapes and sizes can be beau­ti­ful, I felt a lot of shame about not being more accept­ing of my own robust body.

Dr. Ste­vie Edwards is an Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at Clem­son Uni­ver­si­ty and Poet­ry Edi­tor of The South Car­oli­na Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poet­ry, Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review, Tri­Quar­ter­ly, The South­ern Review, and else­where. She is the author of The Weath­er Inside (Uni­ver­si­ty of Arkansas Press, 2026), Qui­et Armor (North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2023), Sad­ness Work­shop (But­ton Poet­ry, 2018), Human­ly (Small Dog­gies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Pub­lish­ing, 2012). She holds a PhD from the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Texas and an MFA from Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty. Orig­i­nal­ly a Michi­gan­der, she now lives in South Car­oli­na with her spouse and a small herd of res­cue pit­bulls. Her work has been sup­port­ed by Ver­mont Stu­dio Cen­ter, Sewa­nee Writ­ers’ Con­fer­ence, SAFTA Fire­fly Farms, and Buin­ho Cre­ative Hub.

Getting Dark

Poetry / Melanie Figg

 

:: Getting Dark ::

                I should have left sooner—I didn’t catch

the quick exit, the growing coldness,
his lack of peripheral vision, casually assuming
              the road would do as he willed, the unhinged jaw—

* 	* 	*

Someone built a labyrinth by the creek. I trace
its path bordered by gray stones and fig buttercup.
At each turn I feel myself returning
from years of silence, trying to, trying—

                                                      The phantom of me filling in uneven with regret—

Blood coming back to the ghost hands.

              The heart empty after so much refusal, following
              where the stones steer. The ease of no choice, just a route to follow—

* 	* 	*

During a laying on of hands
                          she found my ex in my solar plexus
                                                                   he likes to hang out there
in your power center, where you set your goals. Panic flared
              to scatter reason: in me how long did I let him in no wonder oh god oh god—

At these moments, it’s best to politely ask them to leave.

          My hands fly to my throat,
                                     stunned birds bouncing from the window, arms numbing—

          I told him it was in his best interest to leave now. 	He took
quickly to that, no surprise, and she moved her hands to my neck. Circling back

                           before my time was up
                                                                she found him still lingering at the fueling station.

Gravel scattered as he pulled back onto the road.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

In most of my poems, I explore mem­o­ry, and absence, and grief—how that can be rep­re­sent­ed on the page with white space, a stut­ter­ing line, a reach­ing beyond nar­ra­tive. A lot of my poems sit in between nar­ra­tive and lyric as I try to slow down the move­ment between a thought and a feeling—the tran­si­tion as one changes one’s mind, or lets go of bad math or unhelp­ful ver­sions. My new man­u­script includes poems from a wide range of sub­ject matter.

One: I’ve been untan­gling from a ter­ri­ble mar­riage and have been explor­ing the expe­ri­ence of slow manip­u­la­tion and gaslight­ing, of los­ing one­self to an idea that has dis­con­nect­ed from real­i­ty and to a per­son you no longer rec­og­nize. That skewed per­spec­tive, that pro­found sense of destabilization—how to exam­ine that expe­ri­ence in lan­guage, and in white space on the page? The glimpses of recog­ni­tion, of return, of recovery—how can those moments be doc­u­ment­ed in a way that can offer a read­er acknowl­edge­ment or under­stand­ing? I want to slow down emo­tion­al tran­si­tions so they can be explored and mapped, accepted.

Two: I’ve also been writ­ing poems about a promi­nent cold case from my rur­al girl­hood: the Con­necti­cut Riv­er Val­ley Ser­i­al Killer. From 1978–1988, author­i­ties believe one man drove up and down I‑91 along the riv­er that divides Ver­mont and New Hamp­shire. As a young teenag­er, women around me were abduct­ed and mur­dered and found lat­er near­by. Of the nine women he was believed to kill, I knew two of them: a girl from my high school who used to bul­ly me, and one of my mother’s best friends for whom I babysat her son. Sure­ly such inten­tion­al and ran­dom vio­lence had left its mark on me? How much were my ideas of gen­der, agency, safe­ty, and nature formed from this?

“Get­ting Dark” is one of the first “bridge” poems that I’ve writ­ten for the man­u­script. I was strug­gling to fig­ure out how knit togeth­er these two seem­ing­ly dis­parate, but actu­al­ly deeply relat­ed, top­ics into one book—until I real­ized I could do the weav­ing inside some of the poems. In “Get­ting Dark” I found that some “ser­i­al killer” imagery added an inter­est­ing dimen­sion to the bad-hus­band nar­ra­tive. I’m curi­ous to see how far this imagery-trade strat­e­gy can work as I con­tin­ue to build the man­u­script. I don’t think the read­er needs to know about the ser­i­al killer stuff to get this poem, but know­ing it adds a deep­er read­ing, I hope, and steers the read­er to make con­nec­tions about small and large scale sys­tems of misog­y­ny, how oppres­sive sys­tems enter our per­son­al lives.

Melanie Figg’s writ­ing awards include Fel­low­ships from the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, The McK­night Foun­da­tion, and the Mary­land State Arts Coun­cil. In her award-win­ning debut col­lec­tion, Trace, from New Rivers Press, “Figg kin­dles bro­ken, dying embers into a roar­ing memo­r­i­al for the voiceless.”(Kirkus starred review). Her poems have been pub­lished in dozens of jour­nals, includ­ing LIT, Col­orado Review, and The Iron Horse Lit­er­ary Review. Melanie teach­es writ­ing, offers women’s writ­ing retreats, and works remote­ly with all kinds of writers.

from The Field

Poetry / Carolyn Guinzio

 

:: from The Field ::

we took a dri­ve south to escape game traf­fic to put dis­tance between our­selves and oth­er peo­ple from where we stood togeth­er in the field that morn­ing we could see through the trees which were los­ing their leaves on the hills all the way to the new high­way though by then we had stopped call­ing it new it was cov­ered with lines of cars head­ing north so we got on the old high­way and went south into the moun­tains where the future is con­cealed there was a heavy fog we could not make out the fire tow­er the shapes that were on the shoul­ders or the trees some­how we did not feel that we had saved our­selves from any­thing we were dri­ving into an abyss the chil­dren were in the back hold­ing stuffed ani­mals they would lat­er bury under the field we talked qui­et­ly in the front about what some­one had told us the day before about being on his way home from work when he saw an ambu­lance speed­ing toward his house he feared for its inhab­i­tants he began to imag­ine ter­ri­fy­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties then his part­ner chimed in to say it could not have been their house because every­one who lived there was strong the ambu­lance must have been called to a weak­er address his­to­ry had clear­ly taught us dif­fer­ent lessons is any giv­en house the only right one we looked out the win­dows at desert­ed tourist spots clus­ters of dense­ly shroud­ed road­side cab­ins with views of the riv­er deep in the val­ley below the erod­ed and opaque hills the cafes and cab­ins were live­ly before the high­way became the old high­way a treach­er­ous road against which strength had lit­tle val­ue it swal­lowed the dis­traught dis­tract­ed exhaust­ed intox­i­cat­ed the desert­ers and loy­al local wan­der­ers alike we are all equals in the eyes of the angels and demons who pounce from the mar­gins of the old high­way spring­ing to stand on the dou­ble yel­low lean­ing on the sign that says right lane ends who­ev­er holds the sign that says do not pass gets to decide what it means in the fog on the old high­way the inan­i­mate seem to be alive a yel­low dol­lar store sign glowed out of the mist we stopped in the boy work­ing there had taped a note next to the reg­is­ter that said I am sor­ry I lost my voice he was wor­ried the cus­tomers would per­ceive his silence as rude­ness how many noticed the note or the lack of speech I am not sure if I would be sor­ry I lost my voice is any giv­en voice the only right one his­to­ry has taught me I might find anoth­er voice we were not yet then count­ing num­bers how many days until we could begin anoth­er chap­ter we were present we were hap­py with the chap­ter we were liv­ing at the time we were hap­py to have the field behind the house we went back north down the moun­tain and the fog burned into light

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

The Field, excerpt­ed here, is a ten-thou­sand word peri­patet­ic hybrid sequence of twen­ty sec­tions of five hun­dred words: blocks of con­tin­u­ous text, ful­ly jus­ti­fied. I want­ed to be account­able for every word. I thought of them as paving stones, places for a read­er to step as they fol­low the path through the field. I wrote the sec­tions out by hand, revis­ing as I went. I record­ed them, revis­ing as I lis­tened back. Every small change had a cas­cad­ing effect on the rest of the sec­tion. The fear of inter­rup­tion is reflect­ed in the lack of punc­tu­a­tion. Weav­ing between lan­guage that is by turns anec­do­tal, philo­soph­i­cal and poet­ic, I want­ed to con­vey a sense of walk­ing while daydreaming.

Car­olyn Guinzio is the author of eight books, most recent­ly Cameo Blue (Carnegie Mel­lon, 2026), A Ver­ti­go Book (Tenth Gate Prize, The Word Works, 2021), and Mean­while in Arkansas, (2025) win­ner of the Quar­ter­ly West Chap­book Con­test. She was the 2025 recip­i­ent of the Porter Lit­er­ary Prize giv­en to an Arkansas writer. A Chica­go native, she has lived in the Ozark Moun­tains just out­side Fayet­teville, Arkansas since 2002. Her web­site is carolynguinzio.my.canva.site.

Reading the Wikipedia Entry on Extinction

Poetry / Jennifer Handy

 

:: Reading the Wikipedia Entry on Extinction ::

	
Sitting in an old VW, a fossilized vehicle, resurrected 
like a Lazarus species. Perched between rocks and God.   

Thomas Jefferson opposed the concept of extinction
on the grounds that it would leave a gap in the Great Chain of Being 
somewhere between God and rocks.

He insisted the woolly mammoth still stomped around somewhere. 
I would like to believe in that kind of world. A world of mammoth
kindness, where no amount of violence could utterly destroy
an entire species. Where the gap between the living
and the dead was smaller, less a canyon, more like a foxhole.
Where I could, in my travels, expect to encounter the spotted wings 
of a passenger pigeon, if not the down-crooked beak of a Mauritian dodo.  

Before I left Contra Costa County, small branched pink flowers 
made local news. The Mt. Diablo buckwheat reclaimed its historic territory 
along with its status among the living. I fled for the same reason
as the flowers: the Home Depots, too much beige paint, 
the suburban stink of over-pavement. 

In the stones and stillness of the desert, I read about habitat destruction, 
urban sprawl, adaptive landscapes. Nearby are three saguaros. 
The zebra-tailed lizard, a familiar companion.  A brief flutter.
The striped wings of a ferruginous pygmy owl. 

Do they know they too are in Wikipedia?  
I move on to viruses and planned extinction.
Endlings and empty forests.  Genocide.    

The zebra-tailed lizard catches a small beetle. Glances in my direction.  
Does lizard push-ups. Ecstatic at being alive.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

This poem has its roots in a recent six-year peri­od I spent camp­ing and liv­ing out­doors in some of the most remote regions of the west­ern Unit­ed States, includ­ing more than two years in the Sono­ran Desert. The imagery of the desert, seared into my body over two con­sec­u­tive sum­mers with­out air con­di­tion­ing, has stayed with me and remains more vis­i­ble and present than my cur­rent sur­round­ings in Iowa.

As an envi­ron­men­tal writer, I draw upon these expe­ri­ences to show human rela­tion­ships unfold­ing against a back­drop of the nat­ur­al world, which is our home in the truest sense of the word. The ety­mol­o­gy of home focus­es on the idea of set­tling or dwelling in a par­tic­u­lar place, which is ulti­mate­ly locat­ed in the land and on the earth, no mat­ter how much we try to dis­con­nect from that real­i­ty and sur­round our­selves with tech­nol­o­gy and bureau­cra­cy and plas­tics. My poet­ics seeks to dis­rupt the dom­i­nant anthro­pocen­tric world­view and to locate dis­cus­sions of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, love, sex, and the body with­in spe­cif­ic ecosys­tems rather than see­ing them as unique­ly human expe­ri­ences, which they are not. 

Jen­nifer Handy is the author of A Child Cries in Levit­town (Fin­ish­ing Line Press) and This Is Not a Polar Bear: A Study in Post­mod­ern Extinc­tion (Fer­n­wood Press, forth­com­ing 2027).  She was the recip­i­ent of a Pearl Hogrefe Fel­low­ship at Iowa State University’s MFA Pro­gram in Cre­ative Writ­ing and Envi­ron­ment and has received sup­port from the Bread Loaf Envi­ron­men­tal Writ­ers Con­fer­ence. She was longlist­ed for Fron­tier Poet­ry’s Nature & Place Prize. Her work has been pub­lished in Tar Riv­er Poet­ry, Inter­im, Voic­es, Great Riv­er Review, The Ilan­ot Review, SHIFT, EcoTheo Review, Wild Roof Jour­nal, Water­shed Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Fly­way: A Jour­nal of Writ­ing & Envi­ron­ment, and MAI: Fem­i­nism and Visu­al Cul­ture. She is also the incom­ing poet­ry edi­tor for Fly­way

Tucson Snow: A Gen‑X Poem

Poetry / Kristin LaTour

 

:: Tucson Snow: A Gen‑X Poem  ::

My mom left me alone again, my three-foot tall
body itching with prickly heat and boredom, this time
by the Salvation Army drop box, 
church parking lot black top, where discarded belongings
were piled in the Tucson sun. I became treasure hunter, 
digging in the discards, when I discovered snow. 
A few loose Styrofoam balls the size of rice 
that swirled up into the breeze off my hand. I found more, 
a ripped bean bag chair full of it. To me, a child 
who had only seen snow in a picture book, 
white spots on a cityscape, this was magic
I reached for and lifted again and again,
twirling under magical falling snow, a fairy in a tale. 

My mother returned, belly full of baby sister, grabbed my arm, 
thumb on bicep, her other four fingers digging
into the bone near my armpit, dragging me 
to the custodian’s office, her growl explaining 
what this little girl thought to do, pressing broom 
and dustpan into my arms as she took 
a plastic garbage bag, marched me 
back to the mess, white blowing across asphalt.

Her remembered snow from Lorain, Ohio winters 
was burdened by gray clouds, was miserable, 
drifts to be shoveled in discomfort, 
her aching back, her father’s white breath telling her
to work faster, it’s not getting warmer out, 
as our backs ached and dripped sweat, our breath
invisible and warm, dry as the hills that rose around 
the cross-topped church as I swept and she scooped.
Another moment I made reminding her of her dreams 
not realized, my wonder bagged up and thrown away.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

I’ve been chang­ing as a poet late­ly, writ­ing more in first per­son and not hid­ing behind third per­son. I’ve nev­er been good at fac­ing my past, at nam­ing what sto­ries are mine. There’s some­thing safe about writ­ing from a dis­tance, cre­at­ing a per­sona that makes a shield between the writer and the read­er. Just there, I did it again. These poems are all about my child­hood, but also about Gen X, my gen­er­a­tion, and what mean­ing I find look­ing back at mem­o­ries. There’s also the issue of being mid­dle-aged and mem­o­ry get­ting mud­dled or just dis­ap­pear­ing. I find I’m writ­ing more poems about what it means to me, and to oth­ers in my gen­er­a­tion, to be Gen‑X, and, as the cliché goes, to be ignored or for­got­ten. While my child­hood was not more or less filled with neglect as my peers’ were, I start­ed dis­as­so­ci­at­ing when I was real­ly young. I want­ed to dis­ap­pear from my fam­i­ly, school, the world, but I was also anchored to the place I lived, the Sono­ran Desert. Grow­ing up in a place so for­eign to many read­ers, there’s a lay­ered lack of  asso­ci­a­tion on top of that. I write most­ly free verse nar­ra­tive when I want to tell a sto­ry, and I lis­ten as I read aloud for line and stan­za breaks. I also use stan­za breaks to denote a change in time/memory/location. I like to think of these poems as open­ings between myself and read­er, a way to make a con­nec­tion. I sup­pose I write these poems to be seen and heard.

Kristin LaTour’s first full-length col­lec­tion, What Will Keep Us Alive, is avail­able from Sun­dress Pub­li­ca­tions. Her most recent chap­book is Ago­ra­pho­bia, from Danc­ing Girl Press. Her poet­ry has appeared in jour­nals such as Rhi­no, Adroit, Cider Press Review, Tin­der­box, and Mass­a­chu­setts Review and in the anthol­o­gy Obses­sion: Ses­ti­nas in the 21st Cen­tu­ry. She is the founder of the Auro­ra Writ­ers Work­shop, a pro­fes­sor at Joli­et Jr. Col­lege, and she lives in Auro­ra, IL.

 

3 Poems

Poetry / Kathryn Nuernberger

 

:: The Passive Voice ::

Operation Big Buzz, 1955: 30,000 mosquitoes
were dispersed into Carver Village,
a predominantly Black neighborhood
in Savannah. The U. S. Army Chemical Corps
wanted to know the feasibility of using
mosquitoes as a yellow fever vector. 

Operation May Day, 1956: Experiment
repeated with releases at ground level
and a plan to recover the mosquitoes
using trays treated with dry ice.

Operation Drop Kick, 1956: More of the same.

In 1958 mosquitoes were released
in the Black community of Avon Park, 
Florida. From the data gathered there, 
it was concluded the cost of attacking
a 7.5 km area with infected mosquitoes 
would be $25,666. An attack on a city 
the size of Washington D.C. (which is to say 
a city the size of Hanoi, Riyadh, Beirut, 
or Ahmedabad) would be $179,232.

“It has been estimated that between
50-90 percent of a nonimmune population
bitten by infected yellow fever mosquitoes
will become infected and 30-40 percent
of victims will die. Thus 50% of the personnel 
in a battalion would likely become 
incapacitated and a large number would die.”

Who did this estimating? William H. Rose, 
Operations Research Analyst, GS-1515-13, 
Job No 1539, is the author of “An Evaluation 
of Entomological Warfare as a Potential 
Danger to the United States and European 
NATO Allies” (March 1981, ROTE 
Project No. 1L162706A553-TA3-7). 

According to William H. Rose’s 2003 obituary,
“Our beloved husband, father, grandfather,
and uncle” was employed at Dugway
Proving Grounds as a microbiologist
for 26 years. After his retirement, he became
involved in Big Brothers Big Sisters
of Utah and received the 1998 Big Brother
of the Year award. He was an active member
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
Saints, held many church positions, and 
spent most of his retirement years serving 
in something called the name extraction 
program, which uses information about 
ancestors in Mormon temple ordinances 
and covenants to seal families forever.

If you wanted to interpret his report
charitably, you could weigh the passage
on intelligence about Russian experiments
exposing prisoners in six-man tents
to plague and the enemy’s certain
commitment to using entomological
warfare. You could highlight the last page,
which describes steps for civilian defense
and argue this was not research for
a weapon at all. You could note his job
class and conclude he was not a manager,
just a person who followed orders, subject
to many layers of approval. You could
consider how he would have told himself
he was protecting his people. That he
was not the one to decide to unleash
swarms on Black neighborhoods, he
was just the one who wrote up the results. 
If you wanted, you could notice how much 
he is like you or how much like me, how 
carefully and conveniently some of us 
can be removed from responsibility.

Somewhere in the document boxes
soaked in the black ink of redactions
and the red stamped words “classified”
and “secret” are the reports on how
much and what kind of training it takes
to overcome the instinctive resistance 
most people have to firing a bullet
into another person’s face. Someone
with a name calculated the relative
costs of making the kind of person
who will drop the bomb, release
the mosquitoes, keep the secret
for the whole rest of his life. The farther 
from the drop zone, the easier it is. 
Sometimes, if the military has done 
its work with maximal efficiency, 
it takes a tremendous act of imagination 
to understand you have done anything at all.

:: The Flinch  ::

The French Revolution begat
the Napoleonic Conquests which 
stretched into the Crimean War
and made Immanuel Nobel rich 
enough to send his boy Alfred 
off to France to study chemistry 
and become obsessed by nitroglycerine, 
enough to invent dynamite 
just in time to replace the family’s 
faltering business selling sea mines 
to Russia now that the Empire
had fallen into peace, but the U.S.
had flared up into Civil War,
and I’m not going to say we
shouldn’t have fought that one
or cast judgement on revolutionaries
in Haiti freeing themselves
either, or give pacifist speeches
to whoever it was who sold the rifles 
to Sioux warriors who took down 
Custer, though I would prefer 
to praise the data the military analyst 
and brigadier general S. L. A. Marshall
gathered on the low firing rates
of soldiers during World War I,
his findings in Men Against Fire:
The Problem of Battle Command 
suggesting up to 75% of soldiers
could not bring themselves to aim
at other humans because of 
some inherent humanity that takes 
enormous amounts of training 
or anguish or terror to overcome, 
though such training exists now, 
because Marshall saw this as a problem 
to be solved, by, for example, 
replacing bullseyes with human 
silhouettes and rapid fire testing. 
And though some researchers 
have called Marshall’s entire data set
into question, I cling to a faith 
he found something true about us, 
because the beginning of the end 
of a war begins with a person 
with a heartbeat and a gun 
who does not shoot. It begins with 
a professor who does not give 
the student a gold star or a B.A.,
a pat on the head or Latin Honors
for his unprecedentedly lethal 
schematic design. There is a father 
who does not send his son 
into the lab to save the family’s
war business by inventing dynamite. 
There is a banker with equity 
and a mortgage fund manager 
with capital and they look 
at the options to invest but they 
do not. There are workers standing 
before fabrication machines 
and rail lines, dockyards, shipping 
containers and cranes and though 
their bellies will rumble and their 
children’s too, they do not fire. 
There are politicians with pens 
standing before a field of missiles 
and none of them fires and I do not 
fire and you do not fire either.

:: Naive ::

You could call me naïve, as the man 
I’m debating says I am, when 
I tell him about the data on WWI 
soldiers and their trigger fingers. 
Up to 75% did not fire or if they
fired, they did not aim. The only 
conclusion you can draw is that 
they missed their targets over 
and over because they did not want 
to hit another person with a bullet. 

You could call my arguments facile,
as some of my colleagues do when
I say we should refuse to participate 
in the invention of weapons. When
they say we would be giving up
something like everything and I say, 
in Old English, a naïve was 
the central block of a spoked 
wheel. In Middle English, naïve 
was a clenched hand. Later it came
to mean natural and unaffected. 
And then a lack of experience, 
judgement, or wisdom. A person 
deserving scorn and dismissal.

I work for an institution led by people 
who want to tell a story about how 
the military will save us. They call this 
serious and responsible. They talk 
about “Dual Use”—wifi, GPS, blood 
transfusions, various vaccines, all 
developed for the military first. 
You’d have to be as naive as a poet, 
to think we could just refuse all that. 

I try to be a serious and responsible 
person. Wars have not stopped since 
we invented gas masks and herbicides. 
Who wouldn’t trade a cell phone 
for Hiroshima? Some people, I learn. 
Maybe a lot. I may be naïve, but I know
what people are and I can imagine 
life without duct tape. It is a life 
without easy transport of ammunition 
boxes in the rattling cargo holds 
of newly-invented airplanes. It is 
a life where all the hoses leak, 
but there are no hoses because 
there never was the atrocity
of a rubber plantation. Except
maybe there are hoses after all
because in this version of the world 
we all have gardens and some of us 
have relations in Ecuador and some 
in Sri Lanka and the rubber tree 
is a remarkable creature, holding
her huge leaves up to the sky 
and who among us doesn’t love 
the way it feels to hold our lips 
to an arc of cold, clear water.  

I know what people are and I know 
violence is part of our nature, but 
it is also the nature of humans to recoil, 
to refuse, to flinch, to turn tail and run 
as fast as they can in the opposite 
direction of a bloodbath. I once taught 
at a university ten miles from an air force 
base and sat often with students who 
couldn’t tell you how they got from 
Fallujah to Survey of American Literature, 
why it is “The Yellow Wallpaper” 
reminds them so much of that buddy 
of theirs, they don’t want to talk about it, 
except maybe a little. But no. They know 
better, they think, than to talk about it. 
One of them doesn’t talk, doesn’t write 
about how the Army tried to wreck him 
of his tenderness by letting—making? 
I don’t know and neither did he—
other recruits rape him during Basic. 
I didn’t know this about him at first. 
I was just an exasperated teacher
sighing, Are you going to turn in the poems, 
or not? And then he was crying 
and I could smell he’d wet his pants 
on my chair. And I said then reassuring 
things as I thought, My god, what 
is this world? He never did turn in 
the poems and he probably does not 
think of himself as someone who 
is stronger than an oil-stinking miasma 
we call war, we call a government, 
we call our president, we call national
interests, we call the economy, the GDP,
the NASDAQ, the DOW, oozing 
across the maps.  But he is. Even when 
the war poured its tar down his throat, 
still he would not let it take him.    

Let us all praise the cowards who 
looked at their blade, their own thin 
arms, the face of some kid in the window
of a blown-out house trying to decide
what he will live or die for, then shit 
their pants and cried like girls. Let us 
praise the girls who cried like girls, 
because that is what a person 
who can still feel their heart and their 
stomach and the way they breathe 
when they sleep and the feeling of a kiss 
from someone who loves them. 
Let us praise the clenched fist of naïve
people, the way the naïve holds 
or doesn’t hold the center of the wheel. 
Let us praise the irresponsible 
and unserious people. Let us wish 
we could be so natural, so unaffected, 
could become once more someone 
who has never known better.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

My cur­rent work-in-progress, A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry of War, is a col­lec­tion of poems that con­sid­ers how the his­to­ry of sci­ence, the prac­tice of mak­ing art, and the inven­tion of uni­ver­si­ties dove­tail with the cre­ation of ever more “inge­nious” weapons used in hor­ri­fy­ing­ly cre­ative fash­ions. Each poem unpacks a spe­cif­ic inci­dent or inven­tion from the his­to­ry of weapons tech­nolo­gies. For exam­ple, the medieval alchemist Hen­ning Brandt dis­cov­ered white phos­pho­rous by evap­o­rat­ing, reheat­ing, and con­dens­ing 1200 gal­lons of urine. What he first thought was the elixir of life has recent­ly been dropped on mul­ti­ple occa­sions in vio­la­tion of the Gene­va Con­ven­tions on civil­ians in Gaza.

And there was the par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­turb­ing con­ver­sa­tion I had with an engi­neer work­ing in the field of bio­mimicry about the aston­ish­ing nature of jel­ly­fish and what a researcher with War Depart­ment fund­ing might learn from study­ing how they move through this world. Imag­ine machines like jel­ly­fish drift­ing beneath a flotil­la of activists attempt­ing to break a block­ade. Imag­ine what those machines could see and hear and threat­en and assure. Now, any time I am struck by beau­ty, I look up what­ev­er has moved me with the words “and weapon” or “and Depart­ment of Defense” or “and DARPA.” What I have learned has been hor­ri­fy­ing, but also illu­mi­nat­ing. I find I cher­ish the liv­ing world more than ever and resent more deeply than I thought pos­si­ble the ways the war machine infil­trates the very fab­ric of our beings. 

The Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment, in part­ner­ship with schol­ars and artists in high­er edu­ca­tion, has ini­ti­at­ed or par­tic­i­pat­ed in a great many geno­cides dur­ing its short his­to­ry as a nation. The inven­tion of rain­bow agents dur­ing the Viet­nam War led to the cre­ation of an entire­ly new cat­e­go­ry of human rights violation—“ecocide”—though in hind­sight we see that this tac­tic was also used as part of the attempt­ed geno­cide on Native Amer­i­can peo­ples through meth­ods like the near-extinc­tion of the buf­fa­lo on the plains, or clos­er to my cur­rent home, the extir­pa­tion of cari­bou in north­ern Min­neso­ta. This kind of hor­rif­ic inge­nu­ity does not emerge in a vacuum—it ges­tates in the minds of clever and cre­ative peo­ple, the kind who often work on uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es like my own. Know­ing how much fund­ing an R‑1 insti­tu­tion receives from Depart­ment of Defense con­tracts, DARPA grants and oth­er forms of mil­i­tary spend­ing, and remem­ber­ing that even the Iowa Writer’s Work­shop received CIA funds at one time, I attempt through the poems in this project to tell a true sto­ry about what it means to learn, cre­ate, imag­ine, and dream at the heart of the empire.

Kathryn Nuern­berg­er’s lat­est book is Held: Essays in Belon­ging (Sara­bande, 2025). Her poet­ry col­lec­tions include RUE (BOA, 2020) and The End of Pink (BOA, 2016). Her oth­er essay col­lec­tions are The Witch of Eye (Sara­bande, 2021) and Brief Inter­views with the Roman­tic Past (Mad Creek Books, 2017). A recip­i­ent of fel­low­ships from the NEA, Amer­i­can Anti­quar­i­an Soci­ety, Bakken Muse­um of Elec­tric­i­ty in Life, H. J. Andrews Research For­est, she is a pro­fes­sor of cre­ative writ­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta. Recent work has appeared in Poet­ry, Iowa Review, West Branch, Get­tys­burg, Cop­per Nick­el, and South­ern Review.

Spoiler alert

Poetry / Gregory Trotter

 

:: Spoiler Alert ::

All of the characters
die in this story &
not in the order you’d prefer 
nor the manner you’d expect 
 
some had a good run
did noble stuff & ate their veggies
others lived just as long
fueled by a white hot hate
 
a Dick for every Jane
you could say & no promise
of a heaven or hell to sort it all out
no proof of another go round 
 
what meaning to make
my darlings but love
 
what solace to take
my darlings but life itself 
humming with menace

beneath us a current
forever a doom
scroll gleaming 
in the darkness.
 
There’s no such thing as bad weather
your mother likes to say
as she bundles up resolute
and walks out the door
 
she’ll return in an hour or two
with the wild scent of snow &
pine light in her eyes and
she’ll say
it’s not that cold out
it’s not that bad 
it feels good in the sun.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

I’ve writ­ten poet­ry since dis­cov­er­ing the dark and delight­ful verse of Edgar Allan Poe when I was in sixth grade. Oh, you should have seen my efforts then to mim­ic his verse. Shame­less and adorable in ret­ro­spect. Got­ta start some­where, am I right?

The sum­mer before, I had my first French kiss with a girl on a pier in Indi­anola, Wash­ing­ton. The kiss was awful–just two gup­pies gasp­ing for air–but the moon and the phos­pho­res­cence in the water were mag­ic beyond my fath­om­ing. In broad strokes, Poe paint­ed a way forward. 

For decades, my poet­ry was large­ly con­fined to my lit­tle black mole­skin jour­nals, my own pri­vate scrib­blings as my life’s course wend­ed through careers, moves, births, deaths, and all sorts of oth­er big and lit­tle hap­pen­ings. Only in recent years have I sought to share my poems with oth­ers through pub­li­ca­tion in lit­er­ary jour­nals and the like. What a bless­ing to redis­cov­er one’s art through the eyes and ears of oth­er peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in mid­dle age.

One’s art sounds hoity-toity. But if I have any art at all, this is it. These hun­gry lines. This tiny hum­ble flame. It ain’t much but I aim to keep it burn­ing. Recur­ring themes in my work seem to include water, more water, bears and crit­ters of all kinds, love, liquor and ghosts. I am bit by bit piec­ing togeth­er some crude under­stand­ing of my life and the world around me.

Gre­go­ry Trot­ter is a Chica­go area poet; his work has been recent­ly pub­lished in Swing, the Prog­en­i­tor Art & Lit­er­ary Jour­nal and East on Cen­tral. He stud­ied cre­ative writ­ing at UC-San­ta Cruz and jour­nal­ism at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, and enjoyed many wild adven­tures in between. He lives in High­land Park, Illi­nois with his wife and two daughters. 

Insomnolent Ruminations

Fiction / Arthur Abramov

 

:: Insomnolent Ruminations ::

 

7:21.

He can­not feel his left arm. The shoul­der aches. Both pits are sweaty, as is the nape of his neck and his low­er back. The fab­ric beneath him has soaked through. The top sheet and bed­spread, he thinks, must weigh 80 lbs. The black­out cur­tains are drawn. The fan is buzzing, click­ing arrhyth­mi­cal­ly, and he can’t shut the damn thing off.

 

7:22.

He is parched. Pro­found­ly parched. His first cup of cof­fee should’ve been forty-sev­en min­utes ago. The sug­ges­tion of a headache has pre­sent­ed itself, and it can­not be ignored. But the cof­fee pods he found in the room two nights ago are gone now, and only the cof­fee-mak­ing con­trap­tion remains, use­less with­out its caf­feinat­ed cups. And all the while it’s rain­ing, and he’s trapped in this sun­less, stuffy, sin­gle-win­dowed shithole.

 

7:23.

He wish­es he had his book­light. He wish­es this room had a bal­cony. He wish­es she’d wake up. And for the love of God, he wish­es she’d get off of him. Her leg—wrapped around his low­er torso—is 125° Fahren­heit. Her sweaty arms like octo­pus ten­ta­cles, envelop­ing him, and he, the poor, help­less sea crea­ture, can find no escape. Her face, pressed into his, is much too close. Her mouth-breath exhales nois­i­ly, sog­gi­ly into his beard, already damp with sweat. Her mess of hair tick­les his ears, catch­es on his eye­lash­es, some­how finds its way up his nose. He thinks to turn his cheek away but knows that in the end she will find him.

 

7:25.

His arm, pinned beneath her slum­ber­ing shape, has fall­en asleep. She has trapped him.

 

7:27.

The mouth-breath­ing con­tin­ues. Is it get­ting louder?

 

7:28.

Unsuc­cess­ful attempt at rolling onto his side. Dead arm still impris­oned. Her ten­ta­cles wrap even tighter around him. There is no escape.

 

7:30.

He was a free man once. A bed to call his own. A cof­feemak­er that brewed him a pot every morn­ing at 6:35. A white noise machine. A room with more than one win­dow. Sheets that weren’t damp with perspiration.

 

7:31.

What is exis­tence, that so many wak­ing hours are spent doing nothing—waiting, star­ing off into space, day­dream­ing? How many hours has he wast­ed? How many min­utes? Sec­onds? And how many more does he have left to waste—until oblivion?

60 sec­onds in a minute.

60 min­utes in an hour.

3600 sec­onds.

3600 sec­onds in an hour.

24 hours in a day.

 

7:33.

86,400 sec­onds in a day.

365 days in a year.

 

7:35.

31,536,000 sec­onds in a year.

But how many more years can a man like him expect to last? Thir­ty-five, he’ll say.

31,536,000 sec­onds times 35 years.

 

7:44.

1,103,760,000 more seconds-ish.

One bil­lion, one hun­dred and three mil­lion, sev­en hun­dred and six­ty thou­sand sec­onds remain­ing. Bil­lion. A num­ber too high to count to. An incom­pre­hen­si­bly big num­ber. He can find com­fort in that bil­lion. What would a bil­lion of any­thing look like? He can­not imag­ine. Even a million…

 

7:46.

But even a bil­lion is finite. It cannot—it will not—go on for­ev­er. He envi­sions some­where an enor­mous count­down clock for his life. Tick­ing away the years, weeks, days, min­utes, the mil­lions and mil­lions of seconds.

 

7:47.

How many of those bil­lion sec­onds aren’t even wak­ing sec­onds? Eight hours of sleep a day, times sev­en… On sec­ond thought, he’d rather live in the mystery.

 

7:49.

Left leg now ful­ly numb beneath the weight of her two stur­dy legs. And what if his sleep­ing leg nev­er woke up again? Has such a thing ever occurred to any­one ever, in all the world? He choos­es to believe that it has at least once.

 

7:50.

…In Latvia. Riga. A home­less man, sleep­ing on a bench beneath a tree on a snowy win­ter evening in Baste­jkalns Park, beside the stat­ue of Rūdolfs Blaumanis—the one where he is seat­ed with his legs crossed, look­ing sto­ic, mus­ta­chioed, strong-browed. And the snow is com­ing down, he thinks, and the man is wrapped in his frozen blan­ket, his arms hugged so tight around his pale, shiv­er­ing body. And what a ter­ri­ble dis­cov­ery he’s made when he wakes in the morn­ing. His limbs encased in an icy fab­ric cocoon, one in which—unbeknownst to him—his arms have become par­a­lyzed, have fall­en asleep for­ev­er. Are they frost­bit­ten? Was the man’s cir­cu­la­tion cut off for too long? How should he know? This scene is only a hypo­thet­i­cal after all.

 

7:52.

How many sec­onds might be in a hun­dred years? Maybe 3,000,000,000 or so? Then the Green­land Shark could live 10,000,000,000 to 15,000,000,000 sec­onds. And why should this animal—a giant fish, no less—be reward­ed with such a glut of time? Sure­ly the mind of a Green­land Shark can­not be that sophisticated—not enough to appre­ci­ate the gen­er­ous bio­log­i­cal gift it has been granted.

 

7:59.

Does she set her week­end alarm for eight?


8:00.

No.

 

8:01.

But maybe he was some­one before that fate­ful night when he made his bed on that bench, when snow cov­ered the park in a blan­ket of white and his limbs fell asleep, this cold man in the park. Before he lay down for the last time, unaware that he’d wake to hands for­ev­er frozen, feet gone lame, and fin­gers that could no longer hold a pen.

 

8:02.

Before, when his face was rec­og­niz­able, his beard cut short, kept tidy, when no more than a dozen of its hairs were gray. When his books were sold in Europe’s finest bookshops.

 

8:03.

The press tours that ran from Prague to Krakow to Berlin, all the way to Vil­nius. But always there was time to return to Riga, to vis­it his school friends, to give a free talk at the Nation­al Library of Latvia, to vis­it his father’s grave. How dread­ful­ly young 52 was for a man to die, he would think.

 

8:04.

How many sec­onds in 52 years? It hurts his brain even think­ing about it.

 

8:05.

But the frozen man in Baste­jkalns Park. Even at the height of his suc­cess, his bril­liance nev­er came close to match­ing that of Rūdolfs Blau­ma­n­is, cel­e­brat­ed mas­ter of Lat­vian realism.

 

8:06.

He wish­es the cup at the edge of the night­stand was just two inch­es clos­er. The fan makes the air too dry—though not, to his dis­may, any cool­er. This dark, stuffy room—with its unopened windows—is too much to endure. And were it not for this woman beside him—or more accu­rate­ly, on top of him—he would rise to his sog­gy, swollen feet, throw back the heavy cur­tains, and let in the fresh morn­ing air.

 

8:07.

He can­not do this, of course. Not until she wakes of her own accord. Awak­ens and frees him from his internment.

 

8:08.

Maybe he is like the oth­er man. This bed: his bench. His lover: the cold, frozen blan­ket that encased the sleep­ing Lat­vian writer, pre­vent­ing him from get­ting up from his makeshift bed. And what if things were reversed and he is a cre­ation of the sleep­ing man’s mind?

 

8:09.

Per­haps a char­ac­ter from one of the author’s many nov­els? Imag­ine all those read­ers con­jur­ing up dif­fer­ent visions of him in their minds as they read his sto­ry in nov­el form. And not just in Latvian—no! For this author had at one time been quite famous. His books were read in Pol­ish and Russ­ian and Ger­man and French and Swedish and Dan­ish and Roman­ian. Think of all the dif­fer­ent ways they might imag­ine him.

 

8:10.

How would he look in the mind of a Dutch per­son, or a read­er in Slove­nia? What about Italy? He pic­tures a sea of inter­na­tion­al doppelgängers—men who look and feel sus­pi­cious­ly sim­i­lar to him but all some­what off from the original.

 

8:11.

He won­ders what the man’s most famous nov­el might have been about. Maybe the sto­ry of a hap­less fel­low, one who stum­bles from one adven­ture to anoth­er. Yes, he can pic­ture it…

 

8:12.

The pipes were paint­ed a sick­ly pea green, though you could be for­giv­en for not hav­ing noticed, caked as they were with so much rust, filth, and grime that they looked like arti­facts new­ly exca­vat­ed from out of the mud. They hung at head height, and they ran through­out the whole of the gloomy, musty-aired base­ment. That they had not yet burst or cor­rod­ed to the point of dis­in­te­gra­tion was a small mir­a­cle, filled, as they were, with that sticky orange water that had turned to poi­son in the decades it had spent inside those met­al tubes.

But Anatol…no…

…Vil­nus!

Vil­nus dared not…

No, that wasn’t right either, but closer…

 

8:13.

Vil­nius? No, that’s a city.

Oļegs.

Gunārs?

No…

Val­dus…

Val­dus? Uldas?

Uld­is, yes! That’s it.

 

8:14.

Uld­is dared not lay a fin­ger on any of the pipes, lest they choose that moment to come apart, flood­ing their cramped, secret home under the old shoe fac­to­ry. For Father would be furi­ous. Furi­ouser than he already tend­ed to be in the first place, Uld­is thought. Why was Father furi­ous? They had a place to live, many pic­tures on the wall, and a vast col­lec­tion of inter­est­ing toys and cut­lery, not to men­tion Father’s enor­mous­ly impres­sive library of books, which Uld­is could not read. But luck­i­ly, Father could read them aloud to his son, who loved hear­ing the odd words and oft-incom­pre­hen­si­ble turns of phrase con­tained in such var­ied works as Reimetoff’s Con­clu­sion, The Machine Eter­nal: Tran­sub­stan­ti­at­ed Tech­nolo­gies Vol. I & II, and Antipo­dal­i­ties.

 

8:15.

Father under­stood the books. Yet, as he remind­ed Uld­is time and again, the ideas them­selves were too com­plex to be ful­ly under­stood by his une­d­u­cat­ed son.

 

“But know that they are impor­tant, boy, and that with­in the pages of these books is enough knowl­edge for one man to study many life­times over.”

 

What a pity that Uld­is should enter his father’s librar­i­um one evening to dis­cov­er the old man unex­pect­ed­ly expired, seat­ed in his favorite arm­chair, his bulging eyes star­ing off into noth­ing­ness, his stiff fin­gers still clutch­ing his beloved copy of Equi­s­ti­cisms: The Mad­den­ing Art.

 

8:16.

He could not recall ever see­ing a per­son be dead before. This was what it looked like? Frozen in place, qui­et. How unlike Father to be so qui­et. Uld­is thought he looked rather com­i­cal. He won­dered when Father would return to the way he’d been before. There was hard­ly a time when he wasn’t talk­ing or read­ing aloud to Uld­is or—just as often—reading to him­self. He did love the sound of Father’s read­ing voice, and he knew that Father loved hear­ing him­self. If he wasn’t read­ing aloud or talk­ing at his son, Father was invari­ably singing some unusu­al melody of his own devis­ing. The sound of Father had filled the house always. Until today.

 

8:17.

Now the house was emp­ty, or it felt empty—this base­ment they called a house. But with­out the sound­track of Father’s voice, their home felt strange­ly unfa­mil­iar, alien. Uld­is did not like this change. He hoped that things would return to nor­mal the fol­low­ing day. But they did not. Nor did they the next day or the day after that.

 

8:18.

What hap­pens to Uld­is next, now that Father is dead and the place is eeri­ly quiet?

 

She mum­bles some­thing indis­cernible. She’s prone to talk­ing in her sleep.

 

8:19.

After a week—or maybe a month—he has real­ized that Father will not return to the way he was before. And there was the odor that came from Father as he grad­u­al­ly decayed in the librar­i­um. Uld­is had tried to keep the insects and the worms at bay, but every morn­ing, no mat­ter how many he’d shooed away the night before, they came back. And Father’s face and hands began to look much less Father-like, until, one morn­ing, Uld­is thought he no longer rec­og­nized Father.

 

8:20.

Father unfa­mil­iar, bugs and worms—and even lit­tle rodents—invading the librar­i­um. The unbear­able stench that made Uldis’s eyes water and turned his stom­ach sour. It was enough to pro­pel the man to climb up the long, dark stair­case and leave his and Father’s base­ment bach­e­lor pad for the first time.

 

8:21.

To stand at the big met­al door that Father told him nev­er to open. And on the oth­er side, what was there? Nev­er before had he any rea­son to ascend the stairs, to open the door.

 

8:22.

And where does he go? On adventures—or, bet­ter yet, on a series of mis­ad­ven­tures. Uld­is would emerge from the under­ground bunker and find him­self in a dilap­i­dat­ed fac­to­ry, filled with ancient, erod­ed machin­ery the likes of which he’d nev­er seen before. And old signs and wrin­kled, fad­ed papers lit­ter­ing the ground, con­tain­ing bizarre sym­bols that to him looked like noth­ing more than gib­ber­ish. For they were not like the symbols—letters, Father called them—that were con­tained with­in those books in the librarium.

 

8:23.

And he would wan­der through every room of the sprawl­ing, mul­ti-build­ing fac­to­ry, inspect­ing each sign and book, peer­ing inside every clos­et, open­ing all the stor­age com­part­ments and lock­ers, run­ning his hands across the sur­face of the impres­sive ancient machin­ery. But he would under­stand nothing.

 

8:24.

And after spend­ing one day or two explor­ing all cor­ners of the fac­to­ry, he would grow bored, and his curios­i­ty would undoubt­ed­ly com­pel him to stray past the front gate of the old shoe factory—out into the snowy white mead­ow beyond. Snow—a thing that Father had tried to describe to his son many times over, but that Uld­is could nev­er quite envi­sion. Yet now he would touch the icy pow­der and feel it melt in his hands, and he would see that Father wasn’t mak­ing up sto­ries pure­ly for his amuse­ment, but that he was telling Uld­is the truth. For the first time, he would feel the chill of the win­ter wind, know what it was to feel cold, a thing he did not know was pos­si­ble until now. And he would wan­der direc­tion­less for hours.

 

8:25.

Oh, to be cold like Uld­is. What he wouldn’t give to be sleep­ing some­where cold, instead of in this dark, cramped, suf­fo­cat­ing lit­tle hotel room in the mid­dle of this mediocre, mid-sized metrop­o­lis. God, it was sweltering.

 

8:26.

The boy roamed the wide mead­ow, cov­ered in a fresh blan­ket of snow, until he could no longer see the dark gray fac­to­ry build­ings behind him. Nor could he recall from which direc­tion he had come. He would wish that Father was with him, could see the enor­mous field of white that seemed to run on for­ev­er. But Uld­is would not return to the fac­to­ry or the base­ment or to Father’s librar­i­um again.

 

8:27.

After a time, he would come upon a vil­lage, with hous­es built into the cliff­side. And in his joy and won­der­ment, he would race to the first per­son he saw, who hap­pened to be an old, shriv­eled-look­ing man rest­ing on a crate. Uld­is would tell him about the snow he had seen in the mead­ow. He would talk and talk, describ­ing every detail. At the end of his expla­na­tion, he would invite the man to come and see the snow for himself—even though Uld­is was not cer­tain he remem­bered the way back. But the old, hunched fel­low gave no reply. He just sat on his crate as he had the whole time, see­ing as he was deaf. Yet even if he could hear Uldis’s words, he wouldn’t have under­stood them, spo­ken in a tongue that was not his own.

 

8:28.

Yes, he thinks. Even though the boy has escaped the tiny world that held him cap­tive for so long, still he is con­fined, cut off—no, iso­lat­ed! Iso­lat­ed from the rest of humanity.

 

What a bleak nov­el the author has written—or, would have writ­ten, this imag­i­nary author who found him­self cold and shiv­er­ing on that snow-cov­ered bench in Baste­jkalns Park in Riga, Latvia—a place so far away as to seem unre­al, imag­ined, almost myth­i­cal. And one in a long line of places that he will like­ly nev­er visit.

 

8:29.

Will he ever make it to Moscow? Not that he par­tic­u­lar­ly wants to go there. But those stun­ning cathedrals—maybe he would like to see them one day. He’s nev­er had any great desire to go there, but maybe the fact that it is off lim­its now makes it more of an appeal­ing des­ti­na­tion. What is it like over there? What are the peo­ple like? How does it smell? What of the Trans-Siber­ian Rail­way, the longest rail­road in all the world, that goes all the way to Siberia? Siberia—that place where they are always dig­ging up fifty-thou­sand-year-old mam­moth carcasses.

 

8:30.

He’s nev­er seen a mam­moth fos­sil, not in real life. Just pic­tures. How does he know they’re even real mam­moth fos­sils? Maybe they’re noth­ing more than a hoax, con­jured up by a bunch of bored sci­en­tists sta­tioned out there at the end of the world. Prac­ti­cal­ly the North Pole, he thinks. How should he know?

 

8:31.

Her snor­ing unceas­ing. He has to uri­nate, but now more of her is draped over him.

 

8:32.

He should call his old­er sis­ter soon. Per­haps tomor­row. It has been a month or two or three. He sup­pos­es she’ll say things are the same, as they always are. That’s the prob­lem with their calls: nev­er able to break free from dis­cussing the same top­ics, ask­ing the same ques­tions, reit­er­at­ing the same opin­ions, and repeat­ing the same turns of phrase they’ve exchanged with one anoth­er for the past two decades. There are days when he despairs that noth­ing new seems to hap­pen anymore—to him or any­one he knows.

 

8:33.

The noth­ing-new-ness of it all. Has he real­ly reached that point of life already? Bare­ly a gray hair on his head, and he’s seen it all, expe­ri­enced every­thing? On days like this one, when he’s bare­ly slept and the air is stale and the skies that ter­ri­ble, over­cast shade of gray­ish-white, but even when the skies are clear, are sun­ny and bright for too many days in a row, that feel­ing, that sense of melan­choly, of utter hope­less­ness creeps back in. Does she get that same feel­ing, he won­ders. Is she over­whelmed with par­a­lyz­ing dread? If so, she’s nev­er told him. No, her mind is untrou­bled by such things.

 

8:34.
Free from the self-pity, the nihilism, the morose dis­po­si­tion that has felt like an inte­gral part of his being for as long as he can remem­ber. Buoy­ant, he some­times called her, though he knew she resents it, as if imply­ing that she is shal­low, not an intro­spec­tive per­son, or maybe a less sub­stan­tive one—though he has been care­ful nev­er to sug­gest as much.

 

8:35.

But he could’ve been a lot of things. He was a lot of things, and he will be more things in the future. But he longs to be some­thing great—or, bet­ter yet, some­one great. A philoso­pher or com­pos­er, he thinks. An arranger—be it ideas or music. He’s always had a mind for puz­zles, for orga­niz­ing, for mak­ing con­nec­tions and find­ing pat­terns, which his moth­er has been all too hap­py to remind him of every time she asks about his work.

 

8:36.

“You were bril­liant!” she’d say.

 

Were. Not are. Were. As if he’d lost it along the way and she griev­ed the fact that her poor, once-bril­liant son was des­tined for a life of dis­ap­point­ment, of medi­oc­rity, of unmet potential.

 

8:37.

Are his sis­ters also a source of dis­may? Know­ing Moth­er, the answer is a resound­ing yes. For who in all the world could live up to Mother’s expec­ta­tions? No one, he decid­ed long ago—not least of all Moth­er. Destined—every one of them—to drown in a deep sea of dis­ap­point­ment. But at least they’re all drown­ing together.

 

8:38.

Togeth­er metaphor­i­cal­ly. He knows the old­est lives in Boston now. The youngest in Dublin—which he’s nev­er been to, come to think of it. And the mid­dle one, he hon­est­ly can’t remem­ber. Sacra­men­to? Hong Kong? Lon­don? Berlin? Didn’t she trav­el through Spain and Por­tu­gal last year? He doesn’t know.

 

8:39.

It’s not his job to keep track of them any­way. Isn’t that the old­est sibling’s role?

 

8:40.

She nev­er had any sisters—she who is fast asleep. An only child. A thing he often thinks would’ve well-suit­ed his own dis­po­si­tion. He’d have been an incred­i­ble only child. No question.

 

8:41.

An only child like Uld­is. Well, not exact­ly like Uld­is, but an only child, nonethe­less. And what must it have been like for Uld­is upon emerg­ing from that under­ground bunker, dis­cov­er­ing a world beyond the fac­to­ry, beyond its crum­bling brick walls and high, rust­ed iron gate? All that snow! And did the bright­ness hurt his eyes, unac­cus­tomed as they were to tak­ing in so much sun­light? What must he have thought when he saw those snow-capped peaks beyond the white meadow—in fact, sur­round­ing it on all sides? Did he know they were moun­tains? Could his eyes make sense of all they saw? They say that blind people—when they have been born blind and then see for the first time—cannot rec­og­nize faces or make sense of three-dimen­sion­al­i­ty. Their eyes and brains bom­bard­ed with a steady stream of alien shapes and shock­ing­ly bright colors.

 

8:42.

But then, if one is born blind, do they still pic­ture things, call forth images with­out ref­er­ence points, see­ing them in their mind’s eye? Or is the world one of smell, touch, taste and sound? Can descrip­tive lan­guage con­jure up images in the brain of an unsight­ed per­son? Or, con­verse­ly, sound in the brain of one who can­not hear? Or taste in one whose palate can­not dif­fer­en­ti­ate sweet from salty or sour from spicy?

 

8:43.

Sure­ly some­one else has thought these same thoughts before.

 

8:44.

But what of Uld­is? In time, he would make his way to anoth­er town in the coun­try­side, where someone—at least one person—can com­mu­ni­cate with him. A dame called Dagmar—which is fun to say aloud. But not a dame in the tra­di­tion­al sense, not a woman of noble breed­ing or high class. No, a dame in the old-fash­ioned, slangy sense of the word. A broad. A gal. A woman.

 

8:45.

Do peo­ple still refer to women as “dames”? He can’t remem­ber. He’d con­sult the doz­ing dame beside him, but he dares not dis­turb her as she dreams.

 

8:46.

Is that thun­der he hears?

 

8:47.

He hears rain pelt­ing the win­dow. He was hop­ing, today, for sun­shine. Alas, they’re inside for anoth­er drea­ry day.

 

8:48.

Uld­is and Dag­mar. Uld­is. An odd name. Why has the author assigned him this han­dle? Vil­nus, he thinks, would be a more inter­est­ing, eas­i­er to remem­ber name. But per­haps it’s too close to Vil­nius, the Lithuan­ian city ref­er­enced in that nov­el by the Amer­i­can author whose name he can nev­er remember.

 

8:49.

And Dag­mar, a Dan­ish expat. A dame—no, woman. He’ll go with woman. A woman who’s hiked halfway across Europe and Asia in the last six years. Why? To see what’s out there, she tells Uldis—something he is also quite eager to dis­cov­er. And where is next for Dagmar?

 

“Siberia,” she says.

 

“What’s Siberia?”

 

“It is the fur­thest east, the most remote region I could think of. It is the end of the world. And once I reach it, I think it will be my last des­ti­na­tion. No more dis­cov­er­ies. No more treks to far-flung cities. That,” she tells him, “is where my jour­ney will end.”

 

8:50.

Nev­er, in her six years of cross-con­ti­nen­tal trav­el, had Dag­mar encoun­tered such a pecu­liar per­son as the orphan, Uld­is. No mat­ter how many ques­tions she asked, she could not fig­ure out where exact­ly he had come from or why he and his father lived for so long in that base­ment beneath the shoe fac­to­ry. He could not describe the path he had tak­en to arrive in this vil­lage, nor did he have any sense of which direc­tion he had come from. North, south, east, west—these points of ref­er­ence meant noth­ing to him. All he had to offer was a place called “the snowy white mead­ow”, a place she knew she had lit­tle hope of ever finding.

 

8:51.

“We are in a place called Lithua­nia. Have you heard of it before? Per­haps it was men­tioned in one of your father’s stories?”

 

But Father had nev­er spo­ken of such a place.

 

8:52.

Dag­mar told him about Lithua­nia, and of the sur­round­ing regions. She spoke of Latvia and Fin­land and Nor­way, of Poland and Czecho­slo­va­kia and Roma­nia and France and Spain and Eng­land and the Nether­lands. She recount­ed tales from her trav­els across the con­ti­nent of Europe, pro­vid­ing Uld­is with an in-depth expla­na­tion of the dif­fer­ence between a vil­lage and a city and a coun­try and a continent.

 

8:53.

Dag­mar from Den­mark. A dis­graced dietit­ian who, after more than a decade of pro­mot­ing dubi­ous diet­ing prac­tices, saw the light on the road to Dubrovnik and turned from her wicked ways. Dagmar’s days of deceit were end­ed, and she had ded­i­cat­ed her­self there­after to find­ing a new call­ing, one she would search for till the end of her days. For what else was her years-long trek across Europe but a jour­ney toward find­ing a pur­pose in the sec­ond half of her life?

 

8:54.

And what is his pur­pose, this man in the dark­ened room of some hotel he couldn’t remem­ber the name of in a town he hoped nev­er to return to? Does he believe in such things as pur­pose? He’s not sure he does—not any­more, at least. But she—she is a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. And not she—as in Dag­mar, though she also believed in pur­pose. She who shares his bed, enjoy­ing the sweet slum­ber that eludes him.

 

8:55.

She believes in so many things. Too many, he often thinks. Believes in God and an after­life. Horo­scopes and per­son­al­i­ty-type tests and rein­car­na­tion. And for a while, hyp­no­sis. But also in fam­i­ly and—in a way that makes him cringe—a kind of nation­al pride. And celebrations—she believes in those. And the impor­tance of a well-thought-out itin­er­ary. She believes in com­post­ing, in own­ing more than one set of bed sheets, and in tak­ing off one’s shoes when­ev­er enter­ing a home—or even this hotel room. And in lis­ten­ing to audio­books and then telling every­one she has read the book, even though she hasn’t done the hard work of star­ing at the page and read­ing every word, every sen­tence, every para­graph. She believes in her hus­band, that he is an intel­li­gent and inter­est­ing man, that they will remain in love until one or both of them even­tu­al­ly expires, and she believes that he will be an excep­tion­al­ly decent father to the half-formed fetus now wig­gling in her womb.

 

8:56.

Mean­while, he believes this morn­ing might go on for­ev­er, that his dear­ly beloved will sleep until lunchtime. And he wish­es he pos­sessed her abil­i­ty to fall (and stay) asleep so effort­less­ly. But no, he is eas­i­ly star­tled awake, not one to fall back asleep once his morn­ing eyes have caught a glimpse of sunlight.

 

8:57.

She, too, was an ear­ly bird, that dame from Den­mark. Ris­ing each morn­ing with the sun and some­how keep­ing awake long after it went back down. Oh, to be able to func­tion on so lit­tle sleep as she did. In meet­ing Uld­is, she had found some­one to talk the day away with. But what had Dag­mar done when she trav­eled those lone­ly, emp­ty roads with no one to talk to, noth­ing to occu­py her but her own thoughts? It was then that Dag­mar dreamed, dreamed of a des­ti­na­tion miles and miles to the east—a place called Siberia.

 

8:58.

Siberia: A state of mind. An imag­i­nary place. Snowy, seclud­ed, beyond reach. He can’t even remem­ber now—is Siberia a region, a state, a town?

 

8:59.

Siberia. Dag­mar. And the oth­er one, Uvis. Ulvis? No, that’s not it. Ulvid? Maybe. Prob­a­bly not. But some­thing like it, some oth­er U name. Why that name? What does it mean?

 

9:00.

The clock strikes nine.

 

9:01.

No 9 o’clock alarm either.

 

9:02.

Dag­mar from Den­mark. Ulvid the Under­ground Orphan? Too absurd. Ulvid, Urchin of the Under­world? More pre­pos­ter­ous. But maybe a lit­tle bet­ter. Ulvid the Unknown—or Unknow­able, or Unlearned. Un…Un…loved? The worst one yet.

 

9:03.

How did his sto­ry arrive here? He had want­ed, once, to go to Europe, to trav­el from its west­ern­most reach­es all the way to its bor­der with mys­te­ri­ous Rus­sia. But he was just out of school, job­less, direc­tion­less, unaware, then, that his life would soon be con­sumed with those ordi­nary tasks so cen­tral to keep­ing one­self busy, housed, and fed.

 

9:04.

The time to embark upon this free-wheel­ing vision quest across that far-off con­ti­nent across the sea grad­u­al­ly slipped away. There was no space in his life for a jour­ney with no fixed des­ti­na­tion. Had he the time, he would be like Dag­mar and hike over the moun­tains, stroll across the rolling hill­sides and down through the val­leys. He would seek out the most remote cor­ners of the world, places not des­ig­nat­ed on any maps he’d ever seen, in the hope that he could see as much as it was pos­si­ble for one man to see. And maybe, along the way, he’d stum­ble across a bug or plant or rock that no oth­er per­son on Earth had ever seen. And he would be the first and only per­son in all of his­to­ry to encounter it…

 

9:05.

But this he did not do.

And so he is left only to imagine.

The fan hums.

And the room is still dark.

And she lies there, snor­ing softly.

And he con­tin­ues to sweat.

And—

Wait!

 

9:06.

She stirs.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

It start­ed in Chica­go, in a dingy hotel I can no longer remem­ber the name of, on a morn­ing when it was already much too hot and I was much too dehy­drat­ed. That feel­ing of being stuck, trapped, hav­ing to wait indef­i­nite­ly in a place you don’t want to be—this was the start of my sto­ry. And as I typed, I let my mind wan­der, noticed myself becom­ing more inter­est­ed in the imag­ined world con­struct­ed by my pro­tag­o­nist. I’m drawn to sto­ries that hint at ful­ly-devel­oped worlds that the read­er can nev­er ful­ly inves­ti­gate: imag­ined book titles or made-up authors. Ref­er­ences to fic­ti­tious events or places. How did Uld­is and Father come to live in their under­ground home? What might be con­tained with­in the pages of Reimetoff’s Con­clu­sion or The Machine Eter­nal: Tran­sub­stan­ti­at­ed Tech­nolo­gies Vol. I & II? Some­times it’s more fun to let the read­er decide for them­selves. I was struck some years ago by how com­pelling a sto­ry can be with­out con­ven­tion­al plot, or when most or even all of the sto­ry takes place with­in one character’s head. In the same way our weary, sleep-deprived brains can take us on sur­pris­ing digres­sions and asso­ci­a­tions, I want­ed for this sto­ry to take read­ers on a sim­i­lar jour­ney, for them to feel that the sto­ry was being thought up on the page as they read. “Insom­no­lent Rumi­na­tions” was my attempt at writ­ing such a story.

Arthur Abramov is a New York-based writer, painter, and sculptor.

When they ask you what happened, what will you tell them? 

Fiction / Chiadi Chineme Jessica

 

:: When they ask you what happened, what will you tell them? ::

Will you tell them how you had enrolled in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ibadan to study mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, in your sick des­per­a­tion to leave the life of your small fish­ing com­mu­ni­ty behind? Will you tell them that you grad­u­at­ed with a pal­try sec­ond class low­er? Clos­er to third class. Will you spin tales of your hus­tle in the car­niv­o­rous city to find a job? First in your field of study when you held your head high, stretch­ing your lithe neck in pride, turn­ing your nose down at what you thought was below you. Then pur­su­ing the jobs you thought beneath you and final­ly when the heat and the shame had beat­en down your back, when the rejec­tions and frus­tra­tions caused your shoul­ders to now brack­et your head which hung low, you turned to POS sales work? 

No. But you will tell them how you had tucked your tail between your legs and bor­rowed some mon­ey from a few wastrels you had befriend­ed with emp­ty promis­es of pay­ing them back, how you ran back to Port Har­court, to your small vil­lage in Bon­ny Island. 

You will tell them how the shame weighed you down so. How you pon­dered on your fail­ure and won­dered what would become of you. The lives of the women in your vil­lage were rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple. Be born, go to pri­ma­ry school, become a sales­woman instead of going to sec­ondary school, mar­ry when your fam­i­ly decides who you will mar­ry, give birth to mul­ti­ple chil­dren, die. Not you. At least you thought. At least your father thought. But he is dead. Not there to defend you and sur­vived by five sons and one incom­pe­tent daugh­ter. 

 Maybe you will laugh when you recall that there were three mar­riage­able men left in your small com­mu­ni­ty. One was a fifty-eight-year-old wid­ow­er with three snot-cov­ered chil­dren, one was a drunk often seen stum­bling around at all hours of the day and even worse, night, and the last was your cousin. Sweet, dark, tall Fubara. So sweet in fact that when you were told by your grand­moth­er with her grat­ing and firm voice that you would mar­ry him, you had planned your death. Sur­ren­der­ing your­self to the excru­ci­at­ing watery grave that had claimed thou­sands of lives by acci­dent rather than sur­ren­der­ing to a life of mar­riage and moth­er­hood that had claimed thou­sands of lives. 

Will you tell them about his sis­ter Atili? Who had sensed your despair? Who had saved you from that life? Yes, you will. You will go into details about the night Atili had told you about Gor-shore. The com­pa­ny that owned that tow­er­ing, white build­ing on the main­land. You will tell them what Atili told you. How she spoke of this off­shore oil com­pa­ny like they were her sav­iour. What she told you about their vis­it to the vil­lage a few weeks before you came home run­ning. That they were look­ing for recruits to train. She told you that they were look­ing for women espe­cial­ly and want­ed to give back to the com­mu­ni­ties that shared the ocean with their stor­age rig. She did­n’t tell you what the job was for because she could­n’t remem­ber. 

You would lat­er find out on a small fer­ry owned by Gor-shore, where you, Atili, six oth­er recruits and two Gor-shore staff were trans­port­ed to Gor-shore’s office on the main­land, where you would spend the next six months train­ing to be an under­wa­ter inspec­tion div­er in charge of the inspec­tions of one of the fixed plat­form stor­age rigs a few kilo­me­tres from their office, deep in the Atlantic. “But not as deep as our explo­ration rigs,” a white man in a clean and crisp blue suit had said, or was it brown? You do not remem­ber but you will remem­ber that the main staff – exec­u­tives, train­ers, work­ers – were all white. The clean­ers, secu­ri­ty guards and oth­er recruits looked just like you in vary­ing shades of choco­late, brown and black. 

You will also recall that the com­pa­ny did not ask for your degree or NYSC cer­tifi­cates. You will tell them when they ask how sus­pi­cious you thought it was but in your eager­ness to escape the life des­tined for women like you, cou­pled with the eupho­ria of the promised salary, you over­looked it. You will men­tion how you and the oth­er recruits were packed into tiny, swel­ter­ing rooms with bunk beds and peel­ing wall paint while the oth­er staff enjoyed lav­ish, spa­cious rooms of cream and beige.

You will hes­i­tate to tell them about your fear of the water, just like you did to your train­ers. How you have nev­er liked swim­ming even though you grew up sur­round­ed by water. You will pon­der on it, whether you were born with the nat­ur­al aver­sion or if it was caused by the acci­dent you had when you were ten. When your father was still alive, whole and hearty. When you fol­lowed him on one of his fish­ing trips like you had done count­less times before, except this time as he regaled you with sto­ries of his child­hood and taught you to cast a net into the ocean upon your rick­ety, wood­en canoe cov­ered with splin­ters, you had flung your net too far and in the force behind your throw, you had also flung your­self into the water. 

What can you remem­ber except the imme­di­ate wave of fear when you found your­self sink­ing. Will you tell them how you thrashed like a fish out of water, flail­ing your hands in front of you, even when you sank deep­er and could not see them stretched out before your eyes? You will remem­ber the oppres­sive force of the push of the ocean above you and the pull of it below you. You will not men­tion to them that your father had swum in after you and pulled you up, nei­ther will you men­tion the feel of some­thing, some­thing strange and oth­er­world­ly, pulling you deep­er into the abyss. 

In an effort to remem­ber Atili, you will tell them how she was the best div­er of your class. How she took to water so nat­u­ral­ly that she seemed like she had lived in it all her life. How blessed her eye­sight was even in the dark­est depths. How she nev­er suc­cumbed to the pres­sure of the mind and of the water. 

Some­time lat­er, a few days after your cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and days before your trans­porta­tion to the rig, you will recall that your grand­moth­er and moth­er had come to the main­land to see you and Atili. You remem­ber how your moth­er had knelt to the ground and raised her voice to the heav­ens as she begged for you and your cousin to stay on land, to not ven­ture into the land of the Mami Water. Your grand­moth­er had joined in, not in your moth­er’s the­atrics, but in her warn­ing. She told you that the Mami Waters were hun­gry crea­tures, crea­tures of decep­tion who lay wait­ing in deep waters to claim the lives of women, and she told you that if you and Atili left, you would be sucked deep down to their lair. 

When they saw how com­mit­ted you and Atili still were, your moth­er had begun to roll on the ground while your grand­moth­er looked you in the eye like she knew of your brush with them years ear­li­er. They will come for you again,she told you. This time they will suc­ceed. Because you are stub­born, she said, because you are weak, and your poor father paid the price with his life. You will not tell them all these. You will sim­ply say that you were vis­it­ed by fam­i­ly. 

You will tell them about your first night on The Tem­ple, the third oil rig of Gor-shore which served as the final stor­age of oil from the rigs hun­dreds of kilo­me­tres out in the ocean, where it stayed before being final­ly trans­port­ed via under­wa­ter oil pipes – which you were trained to main­tain – to the main­land. That night, you had a night­mare about the time you fell into the water. Except this time, your father did not save you and the clam­my, strong feel­ing which encir­cled your ankle con­tin­ued pulling you deep­er, into the dark­ness, into the abyss. And your lungs burned, your whole body thrashed as it strug­gled against the lack of oxy­gen and the chain on your ankle, and soon anoth­er chain wrapped around your sec­ond ankle pulling you deep­er, and then your left hand. You flailed your right hand as best as the pres­sure and resis­tance from the deep sea would let you before it was shack­led, and you could do noth­ing but feel your­self sink­ing fur­ther into the wait­ing arms of some­thing. 

You had wok­en up with tears stream­ing down your face, clutch­ing at your chest as you strug­gled to take deep breaths of air. You had no time to process your night­mare before your col­league had got­ten you out of bed for your first assign­ment. 

Can you remem­ber your first day in the water? Your dry­suit snug around you as sprays of salt water dust­ed your face. You remem­ber your team chat­ting excit­ed­ly around you as your only focus was the deep, dark Atlantic. And in its murky, dim depths, some­thing await­ed you. 

You remem­ber the change in pres­sure and weight as you slow­ly descend­ed to the ocean floor. All around you, you saw your team doing the same. Some had descend­ed far­ther than oth­ers and you could sight Atili a few feet below the rest of you. You zeroed your sights on her as the only famil­iar thing in an unfa­mil­iar place. Her small­er fig­ure slow­ly get­ting swal­lowed up by the dark­ness. 

What will you tell them of the feel­ing of the ocean floor? Will you tell them how you land­ed on the uneven, rocky plane and felt your legs buck­le beneath you. How you stum­bled around before find­ing pur­chase on one of the mas­sive steel pipes which ran along the ocean floor. You will tell them how the depth and dark­ness ter­ri­fied you, how you looked above your­self hop­ing to see some­thing but instead were met with murky waters and an occa­sion­al illic­it sun ray find­ing its way between the dim­ness. You will tell them how you jerked in sur­prise and fear every time a curi­ous fish swam around you, inspect­ing you, a for­eign object in its land. Maybe you will men­tion to them how you felt cold dread seize you. Not from the chill of the sea but from the pierc­ing gaze of some­thing watch­ing you. 

Night­mares began to plague your every sleep­ing moment. You had no escape. You would descend into the Atlantic dur­ing the day and face the cold dark depths again at night in your dreams, every night­mare worse than the last. Every night you would be pulled deep­er into the dark­ness, the clam­my feel­ings mul­ti­plied each night – the hands, the ten­ta­cles, the coils wrap­ping around your limbs, your throat, pulling you to your death – and you would scream, scream out to noth­ing, des­per­ate for help, and with mouth agape, they would reach inside you and pull at your inner cheek, your tongue and jaw as water rushed inside you. So much water that you became bloat­ed, ripe for the meal. 

You for­get the day Atili died, or you try to. It is blur­ry to you now but you remem­ber that you two were paired to inspect the steel columns of the sub­mersible part of the rig. You remem­ber that you felt it again and you prayed to God that this would pass just like it had many dives before. Your prayers went unan­swered because some­thing rushed at both of you, knock­ing you against the hard met­al and dis­ori­ent­ing you. As you came to, your eyes adjust­ing to your spin­ning sur­round­ings, you saw some­thing grey and clam­my, some­thing that looked like it was damp on dry land, grab Atili and pull her. You saw Atili reach out, her arms stretched and her mouth open to scream for help instead of around her rebreather. 

A fel­low div­er had gone after you as you adjust­ed your descent to speeds you were warned against dur­ing your train­ing, to go after your cousin, to get to her quick­er, to save her. But you did­n’t and were too late. You were told that the div­er found you dis­ori­ent­ed on the ocean floor, stum­bling around as you searched for your cousin. She had brought you up to the deck and the crew dis­missed your ram­blings about the crea­ture. They said you were not sure about what you saw, that it was com­mon in divers that descend­ed too fast, that and the ring­ing in your ear. 

Your cousin was nev­er found, even after the count­less search­es, but you’re sure they know that already. The com­pa­ny had offered to send you back to the main­land with your full pay and your cous­in’s, and then some, to pla­cate you, to dis­miss you. You want­ed nei­ther. What a deci­sion it was, to choose between the grave of your cousin and the grief and anger of your fam­i­ly back home. 

The night­mares got worse, they no longer seemed like dreams. They felt like you were back in the water and some­times you would wake to your body drenched. With sweat or with water, you did not know. You dreamt of Atili. How will you describe her pres­ence to them when they ask? Will you men­tion how pale she looked in the water? How her skin had begun to fall off and the fish began to feed on her flesh? Will you men­tion how she was miss­ing an eye, the sock­et bor­ing into you? Will you tell them how her mouth was frozen open, the way it looked when she was scream­ing to you for help? Or will you men­tion how her limbs and body were twist­ed unnat­u­ral­ly? Her elbows and ankles twist­ed back at the joints and her spine bent at an odd angle. 

Maybe not. 

Maybe you will tell them that she spoke to you, that she sang to you. That she began to call to you. First to save her and then to join her. You will not men­tion that behind her you could see the grey mass. That it would speak to you through Atili, some­times tak­ing con­trol of her body and beck­on­ing you to her, to it. You will not be able to describe its inhu­man form, how it was noth­ing that you could com­pre­hend, some­thing that looked human but just not quite, how beneath it was a grungy, rough coil­ing mass of a limb that looked like an assem­bly of dead fish, sharks, peo­ple. You saw the eyes and limbs of many crea­tures amal­ga­mat­ed into the swirling mass that twist­ed and squirmed in the deep dark­ness. It dis­gust­ed you. Even more so when the limb lunged around your form, trap­ping your arms to your body, and began to squeeze. The rough­ness of its sur­face would scratch into your skin, caus­ing you to bleed as it crushed you, and you would wake. 

This time when you awoke, with the screech­ing of Atil­i’s voice in your ears and in your head, cloak­ing your thoughts, you left your room. Stum­bling around the upper deck in your mis­sion to get clos­er to the water. You had the palms of your hands cup­ping your ears in a des­per­ate attempt to block the noise but noth­ing worked, so you screamed. Loud enough to try to drown out the voice of your cousin. Will you recall how you stum­bled to the rail­ing of the deck? And how you puked your guts out although you had not eat­en for days. 

Will you be able to tell them how you looked out into the night and were met with noth­ing? The rig a lone­ly island in the Atlantic. And how you turned your gaze to the sea below you and were met with chill­ing dread. That you expect­ed to feel the famil­iar crea­ture below you and you did. It was look­ing up at you, wait­ing, except this time they were wait­ing. You were look­ing down at them. 

Can you remem­ber your name being called? Mul­ti­ple voic­es ris­ing in a crescen­do, all scream­ing your name as you rushed down to the plat­form in your mad­ness? How you stood at the div­ing plat­form a few feet below deck? This slab that was a bit elon­gat­ed from the hulk­ing mass of the rig and clos­er to the ocean. How you felt the crash­ing waves fling salt water at your feet? What you felt as you heard Atil­i’s voice plead for help. How her voice was mixed with the voice of mul­ti­ple things, call­ing you into the water. You could see them. Their heads break­ing the sur­face, limp, scant threads of hair falling over their grey scalp and skin, their eyes shin­ing black but bright in the dark­ness, and they called to you. 

You will remem­ber the dread that you felt. How you released your blad­der on your­self as your nerves lit on fire, as your brain warned you against your actions. You will remem­ber that you had tried to turn back but your body did not sur­ren­der to you. How it felt like you were march­ing to your death.

You will tell them about the cold that embraced you when you jumped, the bar­ri­er of a wet­suit or dry­suit no longer present against your skin. How the light from the oil rig dis­ap­peared as you sank and you were sur­round­ed with noth­ing but dark­ness and the voic­es of Atili and the oth­ers. How you felt the hold on your limbs as you were pulled fur­ther to your death. How your mind strug­gled but your body did not. 

Will you tell them how you were saved? Saved by the crew who saw you stum­bling around the deck con­fused and scream­ing to the dark­ness, to your­self. The crew who saw you jump into the unset­tled, cav­ernous waters of the Atlantic which crashed against the body of the rig and caused it to rock. 

No, you will not tell them. Because you are deep in the Atlantic, sur­round­ed by dark­ness and hunger, sur­round­ed by the writhing bod­ies of the crea­tures that now swarm you, wait­ing to rip into you. 

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

“What Will You Tell Them?” was one of many hor­ror lean­ing sto­ries I wrote dur­ing a short sto­ry hor­ror fren­zy. In my head, it has always been in sec­ond per­son, and I don’t know why. I had nev­er writ­ten in that style before and had hard­ly read any­thing in it either, but the nature of the sto­ry called for it. The idea came to me while I was writ­ing a dif­fer­ent space hor­ror piece and it was beg­ging to be writ­ten. 

Part of why I love the sto­ry so much is the sec­ond per­son. It crowds you. It does not let you dis­en­gage as eas­i­ly. The sto­ry is meant to be long and wind­ing, some­thing you find your­self trapped inside until you are pow­er­less to do any­thing but watch it unfold. The main char­ac­ter is name­less to rein­force this. I loved the way the style sound­ed in my head. What will you tell them? What will you say? What did you do? It feels like an inter­ro­ga­tion and an inter­nal mono­logue at the same time, one that you can­not escape. It even seems to lead towards a real­i­ty where you have escaped long enough to recall every­thing safe­ly, only for you to realise that you are not safe at all. 

I love writ­ing women, espe­cial­ly women in the wrong head­space in ter­ri­ble sit­u­a­tions, most­ly of their own doing. I thought about the dif­fer­ence between writ­ing a woman los­ing her mind in first per­son ver­sus sec­ond. In first per­son, I get to tell you what she thinks and feels as she spi­rals. But here I do not get that same priv­i­lege. It is a short sto­ry, so I can only enter her psy­che so much. If I describe too much of what she is feel­ing, I risk break­ing the immer­sion. There has to be enough space for the read­er to inhab­it her. 

The sto­ry is also impor­tant to me because hor­ror is still under­rep­re­sent­ed in the Niger­ian lit­er­ary land­scape, and I think women are espe­cial­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed in those spaces. This is my small con­tri­bu­tion, and hope­ful­ly one of many. 

It was always going to take place in the sea because it is a per­son­al fear of mine. There is some­thing hor­ri­fy­ing to me about the deep black sea and every­thing in it. I orig­i­nal­ly want­ed it to take place on a rig much deep­er in the ocean, per­haps an explo­ration rig. I loved the idea of a char­ac­ter stum­bling around the ocean floor in its dark­ness and pres­sure, but I did­n’t know how to write that in a place where the ocean bed is many kilo­me­tres down, so this was per­fect. 

Most impor­tant­ly, I want­ed to rep­re­sent three things, the exploita­tion of the region in Nige­ria due to its resources, the exploita­tive econ­o­my and work­force in the coun­try, and the exploita­tion of women, all three of which sub­tly shape the real hor­rors, the ones beyond the super­nat­ur­al, and the imbal­ance in the main char­ac­ter’s life, push­ing her towards her own death. 

Chia­di Chineme Jes­si­ca is a young Niger­ian aspir­ing author with an inter­est in read­ing, watch­ing, and writ­ing hor­ror and con­tem­po­rary fic­tion. Her inter­est in hor­ror sub­gen­res such as cos­mic, spec­u­la­tive, folk, psy­cho­log­i­cal and goth­ic fic­tion stems from both their rel­a­tive absence in the Niger­ian lit­er­ary space and her fas­ci­na­tion with the unknown and the men­tal anguish of char­ac­ters, espe­cial­ly women. She is par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in writ­ing fic­tion that explores the female body, mind, and actions, as well as the suf­fer­ing and hor­rors women endure, sur­vive, inflict upon them­selves and inflict upon each oth­er.   

The Eastern Feeder

Fiction / Ashley Mangtani 

 

:: The Eastern Feeder ::

The rope had chewed through the meat of Si Khmau’s palms before the same length of split bam­boo came round on the eddy a third time, its splin­tered end lead­ing, the swell at the high lip turn­ing against the tim­ber where the cur­rent should have pushed through. Upstream, Si Knāy stood waist-deep in the chan­nel, face rotat­ed a quar­ter from the oth­ers, and Si Khmau, still only a boy, watched the hands, because the face would tell him noth­ing, not that morn­ing, not on any morn­ing he would have to remem­ber after.

Rain had come down hard into the Kulen hills for six days. By the sec­ond day, the old­er men had stopped speak­ing of it, and by the fourth, they had stopped sleep­ing. On the sev­enth light, they worked the upper gate of the east­ern feed­er canal, a wood­en sluice between lat­erite sup­ports, which car­ried blessed water out of the lin­gas down toward the West Baray, and which the priests inspect­ed in the dry sea­son and for­got dur­ing the monsoon.

The boy had pulled rope on this gate since his twelfth year. He knew the grain under his hands, knew the smell the lat­erite gave back when it took on water, iron com­ing up out of the stone; he did not know what this car­ried. It smelled of upcoun­try and red earth, and of some­thing the high ground had kept down a long while and could hold no longer.

Si Knāy lift­ed his hands from the brace beam, looked at no one, and put them back. The men oper­at­ed with­out speak­ing, nine of them, two boys to run the rope, and sev­en old­er men, some of whom Si Knāy had pulled off the south­ern chan­nel when the rain had not ceased, and the boy knew some by name and knew not to ask after the rest. A man ask­ing names would have been a man say­ing he expect­ed to use them lat­er, and the silence the old­er men kept around him was a mer­cy they did not need to name.

The wet had got into him. The rope slipped the wrong way, and twice he had to take his wrap again, and twice he lost pres­sure on the post while Si Knāy held the upper brace alone. Two years before, Si Knāy had walked the length of the canal to put one hand on the boy’s shoul­der after a slack line, and had wan­dered back with­out a word, the only cor­rec­tion he had tak­en in four years under him. Si Knāy remained at the brace now, though the boy had pulled his first slack line in two years.

Some­where down the chan­nel beyond the bend, a cry broke, com­ing up high and short, end­ing as the wet cord left his fin­gers. The brace went after, and his fin­gers knew he would not bring it back, and the cry reached his bones before it reached his ears. When it stopped, he main­tained a still head, because turn­ing was the old­er men’s work, and what they would not face was not yet his to see.

The thrash against the bul­wark had begun to make a sound he had nev­er heard water make, some­thing deep in the wood, with­out a break. He had heard that sound once, as a small child, the night a wall of the old cause­way gave and his uncle car­ried him out into the dark to put his ear to the ground and lis­ten to the old rocks shift­ing beneath the city. It came again now, up through the chan­nel and through the wood, and trem­bled there like some­thing alive.

Si Knāy lift­ed his face up the chan­nel and held it there, and his hand left the brace. It did not lift to wipe rain from his eyes, did not sig­nal the oth­ers. It went to the block at his hip and pressed flat against it, fin­gers spread, as a rid­er press­es against the chest of a horse to tell whether the breath­ing has gone bad. He held it there a count of two, then returned it to the wood and went on with the strain.

He kept pulling. The rope was dif­fer­ent in a way he could not yet name, and his hands knew before his head did: that the gate would not hold, that it had not been hold­ing for some time, and that Si Knāy had known this since before the rain had stopped seem­ing like rain.

None of the oth­er men looked at Si Knāy. They had been watch­ing him the whole of dawn with­out seem­ing to. Now one of them, Si Chke, who had taught the boy to wrap a wet loop so it would not slip, untied the thread at his own waist and ran it twice around the erect trunk and once around his thigh, and did this with­out cer­e­mo­ny, as one fas­tens his san­dal before going down to the bank. Anoth­er, down­stream, did the same, and then Si Knāy him­self hooked in.

The riv­er pushed hard against the planks, checked only by the heavy weight and the grip he kept on the line. He thought of noth­ing, or he thought of his moth­er car­ry­ing fish up from the lake in a bam­boo bas­ket, drip­ping onto her hip, the slap her san­dals had made on the wet path, the way he had once stepped exact­ly into her foot­prints and felt the warm shape where her foot had been.

The line endured, but he nev­er lashed it or bound him­self to the upright. The cord at his waist stayed knot­ted where his moth­er had tied it on the morn he left the house, six days before, dou­ble, and then once more, and he had not undone it since.

Si Knāy and Si Chke labored, bound to the wood. Down the line, four of the men whose names he had not asked had made them­selves fast, and the fifth, a thin man with a burn scar at the side of his neck, was work­ing a line around his ankle in a bow that came out wrong the first time and right the sec­ond. Only the boy and one oth­er had not tied; that oth­er was Si Sva, old­er than him by two years, who had a wife in the city and an infant son he had once seen at the fes­ti­val of the ris­ing waters, asleep against his moth­er in a sling of indi­go cloth.

Si Sva caught his gaze, just once, and nei­ther spoke nor nod­ded, nor did any of the things a man does to give anoth­er man per­mis­sion. It last­ed no longer than a damp rope takes to relax, and he under­stood from it that no one was going to give any­one per­mis­sion that morn­ing, that per­mis­sion belonged to oth­er days and to oth­er men. Si Sva unwound the cord from his waist, let it fall into the mud, and left. He trod rather than ran, as one wan­ders back to the hut after the day has end­ed, and the rain came down on his shoul­ders as he went, and Si Knāy kept his eyes forward.

The boy dwelled at the rope a count he would not after­ward remem­ber, as long as it takes to draw three breaths, or two, or one, and in that span the water­line rose against the tim­ber the width of his thumb. Then his hands let go.

He fixed his sight past Si Knāy, past Si Chke, past the men whose names he had not asked. He broke from the line and walked as Si Sva had walked, into the rain, away from the gate, and his cord stayed dou­ble-tied at his waist as his moth­er had done, as the women of his vil­lage had secured their sons’ cords for as long as any­one could remem­ber and longer.

He had gone fifty paces, his san­dals tak­ing on mud past the ankle, when a vibra­tion came up through his heels and broke the rain­wa­ter in the prints at his rear, and he under­stood that this was not the riv­er. The riv­er had its own pulse, and he had been car­ry­ing it in his palms, and this was some­thing com­ing from above.

He had not looked up when he heard a cry out beyond the bend, because look­ing had not been his to do. But he had already left the dressed blocks and entered the mud, and what came next was no longer the old­er men’s work, and so he faced it.

Behind him, where the chan­nel met the catch­ment, the face of the upper hill­side had come away from itself along a line that had always been there, and what moved down toward him was bro­ken sand­stone and torn teak, taller than the tem­ples of the city, mov­ing the way the riv­er had nev­er moved, with­out chan­nel and in silence, up through the rope and the wood.

Where the wall had not yet reached, Si Knāy and Si Chke and the oth­ers stood with their ropes anchor­ing them to the tim­ber, doing what they had always done; none of them had turned. Then the wall reached the gate—and the gate was not there, and the men were not there, and the place where the men had been was not there, and what passed through was the upper hill­side on its way down to the city.

He ran. He had not known until then that he could still run, but his legs ran, and the mud under his san­dals rose to his calves and then his knees. He came up onto a stand above the east­ern feed­er, ground his grand­fa­ther had once told him would stand when oth­er ground would not, and from there he watched.

The flood had already left the chan­nel. It moved in a sheet across the plain, and where it went, the low­land vil­lages and the rice ter­races and the stilt hous­es gave way. The hill­side became a great wave and rolled on toward the city, where cook­ing smoke thread­ed the rain, and he watched the earth close.

The mud touched the out­er moats, and the moats took the mud and could take no more. Water came over the retain­er walls in a long red wash, and the nagas went under, and the mer­chants’ stalls that had been heavy with stacked rice an hour before went down, and the low­er gal­leries of the tem­ple com­plex began to fill with the colour of the upcoun­try. The silt climbed the steps of the cen­tral tem­ple, as if it had always meant to.

Priests lin­gered on the upper ter­races, and vil­lagers crowd­ed the high­est steps. No one screamed, and no one ran; the run­ning was over, and the peo­ple who had reached the tem­ple had reached it because there was nowhere left. The boy stood on the high ground until the rain stopped, which was some time after he had ceased watching.

He left the city before the flood had fin­ished with it. He was one of a thou­sand, and then ten thou­sand, and the leav­ing became some­thing the city itself did, across a gen­er­a­tion, until what had been Angkor was a place where men went only to cut mason­ry from the tem­ples of gods who had stopped requir­ing any­thing of anyone.

In the years that fol­lowed, he turned his back on the east­ern feed­er. He did not speak the name of Si Knāy, or of Si Chke, or of Si Sva, or of the men he had not known well enough to name, and the not-speak­ing became a thing in him that he went around year after year, as a man behind a plough goes around a buried stone.

He took a wife in a vil­lage two days east, and he had sons and daugh­ters, and he worked wood and not water. His sons han­dled wood after him, and none of them knew the smell of lat­erite when it took the first rain of the sea­son, and he chose not to teach them.

When he was old, his youngest grand­son came to him with a length of rope from the mar­ket and asked him how to tie a good knot. He was per­haps eight, with his moth­er’s slen­der fin­gers. The old man took it, and the knot came to him with­out thought, and it came out of his hands as it had always come, dou­ble, and then once more, the way his moth­er had tied his own cord at his waist on a morn­ing six­ty years before.

He gave it back to the boy and sat there, draw­ing in a breath. His hands smelled of noth­ing, and had not smelled of the canal in six­ty years. His grand­son ran out into the yard with the rope, call­ing some­thing back over his shoul­der the old man did not catch and did not need to. He sat in the door­way and watched the rain come down on the lat­erite step, and his hands stayed open in his lap.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

The East­ern Feed­er grew out of my trav­els in South­east Asia after leav­ing the UK and my for­mer career as a civ­il ser­vant. Over the past few years, I have spent extend­ed peri­ods liv­ing in the region and have returned to the Angkor archae­o­log­i­cal com­plex sev­er­al times. The scale of the site is dif­fi­cult to grasp until you stand among it. Along­side the mon­u­ments them­selves, I became inter­est­ed in the frag­ments of his­to­ry that sur­vive through local sto­ries and guides.

Dur­ing one vis­it, a guide told me about the rope pullers depict­ed in the famous bas-relief of the Churn­ing of the Ocean of Milk. The image stayed with me, and I found myself think­ing less about the gods and myth­i­cal fig­ures at the cen­tre of the scene and more about the anony­mous rope pullers whose pur­pose was sim­ply to pull. That idea became the start­ing point for the story.

While writ­ing The East­ern Feed­er, I was inter­est­ed in the rela­tion­ship between labour, belief, and inher­it­ed sys­tems. Many of the struc­tures that shape our lives pre­date us and will like­ly out­last us, yet peo­ple con­tin­ue to sus­tain them with­out always under­stand­ing their ori­gins or ulti­mate pur­pose. The sto­ry emerged from that ten­sion, fil­tered through the atmos­phere of Angkor and the sense of deep time that the site evokes.

Although the set­ting and events are fic­tion­al, the expe­ri­ence of walk­ing through tem­ple com­plex­es, hear­ing local inter­pre­ta­tions of their his­to­ry, and imag­in­ing the lives of those con­nect­ed to them formed the foun­da­tion of the piece. The sto­ry explores what hap­pens when duty out­lasts mem­o­ry, and when peo­ple find mean­ing with­in sys­tems larg­er than any indi­vid­ual can comprehend.

Ash­ley Mang­tani is a slip­stream writer who’s nev­er met a rule of real­i­ty he did­n’t want to bend, most­ly because straight fic­tion nev­er let him say what he actu­al­ly meant. Nom­i­nat­ed for Best Small Fic­tions and the Push­cart Prize 26, his work appears or is forth­com­ing in over fifty lit­er­ary jour­nals, includ­ing Smoke­long Quar­ter­ly, Strange Hori­zons, Litro, Wash­ing­ton Square Review, Gone Lawn, Ghost Para­chute, Boudin, Heavy Feath­er Review, BULL, Cher­ry Tree, Thin Skin, The Fool’s World, HAWKEYE, Mobius, i70 Review, Pal­isades Review, Third Wednes­day, Rock Salt, Neon Dystopia, Apoc­a­lypse Con­fi­den­tial, and many oth­ers. His debut short sto­ry col­lec­tion, Unhap­py End­ings, will be avail­able in 2027, and he’s cur­rent­ly fin­ish­ing his novel­la series, Crescen­do. Read more at ashleymangtani.com