580 Split

From the Editors

Raihana Haynes-Venerable, D. A. Mejía, Arya Samuelson, Sean Schaeffer, and Kari Treese

In this issue of 580 Split, we invited writing and visual art that reflects on the breaches of our current political climate, the ways these breaches have scarred and marked us, and moments that break through the surface of the status quo to create something new. Though these are dangerous times for the vulnerable and marginalized among us, we were interested in writing that explores the creative potential of destruction, that meditates on how to bridge and heal the rifts in our culture, our relationships, ourselves.

We were honored to receive so much work negotiating difficult terrain. As we worked together to construct the issue we noticed how much of the writing included here speaks to overlapping questions and concerns — the ways that climate change is related to migration, or the experience of queerness and femininity too often shaped by violence. Here’s a snapshot of our process as we attempted to map the breaches and their intersections explored by the writers we’ve chosen:

A blackboard with chalk writing and outline of how different authors and pieces might relate to different themes

We begin with a multimedia video poem by Fabian Romero, something we are excited to present now that 580 Split is a fully digital platform. Romero’s “Three Routes” is emblematic of the ways that artists in this issue complicate the question of border/boundary/crossing, grappling with thresholds, families, resistance, peripheries, and bodies.

We hope you enjoy the issue, and check back — we’ll be adding audio recordings of pieces in the coming months.

Three Routes

fabian romero

Bio

fabian romero (Purepécha) is a two-spirit poet, filmmaker, artist and P.h.D. student in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. fabian’s academic and artistic interests integrate settler colonialism, Performance Studies, racial capitalism with storytelling and poetry. Their work centers Purépecha people from Michoacán, Mexico to Seattle, Washington and beyond.

Work

Three Routes

Issue 21: Breach

part 1

we were raised by the flowering gardens
its thorns taught us to respect the hands that made their siblings rise out towards the sun

i knew the earth told stories
as children we took turns climbing a rackety ladder to the tallest rooftop to look far enough into the skyline for the next sign or symbol

we were told we came from turtles
some children said flying fish
some tios said that we were pinche indios
some tias while making the tortillas would whisper that we were actually the children of the revolution yet not quite mestizo enough to be unquestionably Mexican
there was a third root and the sun brought it out in our skin on some months

spend too much time in the sun
we were warned
and we couldn’t pass for mestizo anymore

part 2

on the third route north
i got to walk land so hurt it spoke the names of those who had died trying to cross it
names and names singing with the wind
heat hailing history hiding deep inside
the fear of having to cross borders spills into the minds of those who survive them
borders eat memories
and yet the snake of the Mexican flag clung to my braid
the waving symbol of unbelonging rattling the history that speaks serpent and swallows denial

what is now Mexico was once land to 17 separate nations
my Purepécha ancestors were known to be powerful and yet they were no match for the ruthlessness of the landtakers and gold eaters
when the Spanish came they brought 200,000 Enslaved Africans
they buried gods, goddesses and ritual monuments
they divided land, overtook crop production and placed Africans and Moors in roles of the land supervisor
this was in line with their constructed caste systems

yet Africans, Afro-Indigenous and indigenous people fought for freedom
many successful revolts were fought, alliances formed, pueblos built
and when it came to form the nation of Mexico, a revolution led by Emiliano Zapata an Afro-Mexican peasant who fought to return land to indigenous peoples, the powerful chose to construct borders
they chose to become history erasers/memory takers and with it Zapata became a mestizo revolutionary, his Blackness erased like that of Mexico’s

4-8%
that is how much African DNA a mestizo from Mexico is estimated to have
when i spend too much time in the sun i sometimes wonder if i don’t pass for mestizo anymore
if i too have the third root growing out from the serpent skin on my neck
remember remember
i am a child of the revolution

in case you don’t hear it
turtle island and all that is now the United States howls with grief
names become wails
if you listen you can hear the land asking to know it’s history
the land says “do not let your memory become a feast for the powerful”

Bio

fabian romero (Purepécha) is a two-spirit poet, filmmaker, artist and P.h.D. student in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. fabian’s academic and artistic interests integrate settler colonialism, Performance Studies, racial capitalism with storytelling and poetry. Their work centers Purépecha people from Michoacán, Mexico to Seattle, Washington and beyond.

The Last Weekend (Excerpt)

Shanthi Sekaran

Bio

Shanthi Sekaran’s most recent novel, Lucky Boy was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. Her essays and stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, and the LA Review of Books. She’s an AWP mentor, and teaches writing at Mills College.

Work

The Last Weekend (Excerpt)

Issue 21: Breach

Every woman found her own way to vanish. Some went quietly, in total denial, waking and eating and speaking and sleeping until no one around them makes sense anymore. Some planned for the aftermath. Others kept meticulous track of their progress. These were the same women who once bought all the books on pregnancy. All the books on parenting and sleep and baby sign language and developmental play and reflective listening for toddlers. These were the women who chose their own memory homes, filled in the applications and laid down the deposits. These were the women who set up online dating profiles for their husbands, gift lists for the future birthdays of children and grandchildren who one day would mean nothing. These woman charted their forgetting, taped photos of family members to their refrigerators, labeled them with names and titles.

And there were always the denialists, women forever on the brink of discovery. Fighting, fighting. They did yoga and bought supplements. They subscribed to brain training services and gave their money to life coaches and nutritionists, convinced they could vitamin their way out of the inevitable.

I was, like most, some combination of all these women. I was in total denial that I would lose myself when my memory went. I would always be myself.

Sometimes I think it must be easier for everyone involved, for women to get old and—poof—be gone. Or else they would have solved it, right? They would have found a way to keep us here, to keep our memories together. But they haven’t. So here I go. So here we go.

It was my idea, not Fonz’s, to open our relationship. Fonz would remind me of this whenever a grievance dallied at my lip, often before the grievance dallied at my lip. We’d been together 20 years, long enough to hear each other’s words before they turned to sound. People always assume it’s the man who wants it. It’s pretty common, in any case, in this world of fading women, for men to have younger girlfriends. Women, waiting, wings. Honestly, monogamy felt more dangerous, with its sustained illusion of fidelity, its secret affairs.

Some men waited until their wives were gone and then, reluctantly, began again. They came up with usernames and passwords. They went to mixers. They took their first shaky steps towards women in coffee shops. Then there were men who never remarried, never found anyone new. But not Fonz. That just wouldn’t be right for him. It would have had to happen at some point, this taking of another woman—and how medieval that sounded! I preferred to have it happen before I left. I preferred to know who’d be replacing me.

“But no one could replace you.” Fonz. Husband. A crown of gray hair, eyes set deep with longing.

And yes, this too was true. I was irreplaceable.

Fonz hoisted himself up in bed, shirtless, a perfect crop of white hair on his chest. “Good morning, in any case.” He slipped the strap of my nightgown off my shoulder, almost as an afterthought, his mind elsewhere. “What brings all this to mind?”

All this may sound controlling or delusional or passive-aggressive, but it wasn’t. Or maybe it was. But it’s how I wanted to do it, everyone on board, everyone actually looking this situation in the face and facing it, instead of waiting for the leaving and the grieving, followed by Fonz’s furtive thoughts of a new relationship—a new relationship with who knows who? He could have turned dimwit, addled by loneliness, wandering into the clutches—the clutches!—of a nubile young idiot. Whoever she ended up being, I wanted to know her. There was something incredibly monogamous about that, I thought.

“We chose each other so young,” I said.

“We chose well.”

“We did.” But how could we have known how long a lifetime could take?

To our already solid core, we would add the bodies and minds of others. And we would stay together, Fonz and Esha. We knew each other so well, so well. “And also…you know.”
“What do I know?”

“You know you’ll have to find someone eventually.”

“Will I?”

“When I’m gone.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

I leered at him, grinned. “The vanishing,” I hissed. I threw off the covers and climbed into his lap, facing him, and clenched my knees around his thighs. I took his face in my hands, “I’ll be gone, gone, gone, Fonzarelli.”
Fonz gazed back. His eyes were tired, his cheeks slack. He wouldn’t play along. He would never play along with this. There was nothing about my vanishing he could play with.

I pushed my fingers against the grain of his stubble. I liked it just like this, not quite long enough to be a beard, but longer than a day’s forgotten shave. “I’d rather you found someone now,” I said. “Someone I could know. You know?”

He sighed. “Someone you approve of.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a little early to be thinking about this, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “I’m forty-seven. My periods are getting closer together.”

Fonz grimaced. He’d never got used to period talk, and so I tried to ambush him with it whenever I could. But that morning, I let the conversation peter out. There would be no conclusions that morning, not with his wife straddling him like this, not when his hands could find their way up her nightgown to the rock face of her thighs. No decisions would be made that day.

But a few weeks later, we found ourselves at something called a Poly Happy Hour. This was where people in committed relationships went to find people to be satellites to those committed relationships. Sometimes they formed their own committed three-way relationships, sometimes not, but the underlying principle was that monogamy was an unnatural state of being, that it denied humans an essential part of their humanity. We’d done the reading. It was all over the internet: The human heart holds an infinite capacity to love, the websites claimed, so why not take this love and spread it? Once the hurdles of jealousy and possession were accounted for, once people realized that open communication and emotional processing could crack jealousy like a kidney stone, the possibilities of human connection were endless.

A beautiful theory. A life-affirming theory. But what to do with this beautiful, life-affirming theory when one walks into a polyamorous happy hour and is struck with terror? To be clear, it was I who was terror-struck. Fonz was just fine.

“Greyhounds?” he asked, and headed to the bar when I didn’t answer. Without a doubt, greyhounds. The odd thing about these happy hours was that everyone was on the menu. Most bars, most nights, you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to admit they were interested in anything but the drink before them and the friends around them. The intentionality in that bar, that night, was a blast of terrifying, hyper-oxygenated possibility.
And the people in that room. Some of them were our age—clearly they’d had the same idea as us. But the rest. The rest were so young. Some in their twenties. What were they doing at a poly happy hour? Wasn’t everyone poly in their twenties?

Fonz came over with two pink drinks. Here was the thing with Fonz and me. I was attracted to almost no one, he to almost everyone.

“See anyone you like?” Fonz asked. I cringed. I was keenly aware, just then, of where the term meat-market came from.

“What are you doing?” His voice grew low, worried.

I blinked at him. I’d slunk into a corner of the bar and stood with my back against the wall, almost invisible. I took a glass from him and swigged. The ice rammed into my teeth.

We stood quietly together for a few minutes, watching the room full of people who seemed to know how to talk to each other. He reached over and placed a hand on my arm. “Stop chewing on your glass,” he said. I slurped at the ice, at the bitter and sour and sweet of my greyhound. Fonz was wearing a black corduroy blazer and jeans, a white shirt that sparked against his brown skin. I could see him again, suddenly. The couple nearest us wore deliberately torn t-shirts, the woman in colossal furry boots that rose to her knees, torn fishnet stockings. I wore a turtleneck sweater. I was a Stepford Wife.

“Look,” he said, “I’m going to walk around. You want to come with me?”

I didn’t know what I was doing there. I did know precisely how many ice cubes were in my glass. “No.”

“Okay. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m going to talk to people. You should talk to people too, okay?” He waited for an answer. “Should we leave?”

“No.”

“This was your idea, Esh.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be back.”

And he ventured into the crowd. I watched him course through the room. Fonz without Esha. Husband minus wife. I’d never known him like this—only for a few minutes, one night twenty years earlier, at a friend’s dinner party. His hair had been black then. I’d liked how easily he laughed. He made me feel like someone who could make people laugh. Who could make a man like him laugh. Now, I watched him move through the crowd, not looking quite so out of place as I’d imagined he would. There were the torn t-shirts, the half-shaved heads, and there were people who looked like me and Fonz. Well. Not exactly like us. Not brown like us.

He hovered at the edge of a group. I would have sooner died. He seemed never to doubt that he belonged. From the day I’d met him, Fonz had been wholly confident of his desirability. A byproduct, maybe, of being a British Indian in California, his every utterance a souvenir.

Let’s say someone traveled through time—a cave man, let’s say—and wanted to know how the modern world worked. Let’s say he ended up here, for whatever reason, in my little town. Let’s say, somehow, he found me. I wouldn’t take him to New York. I would show him the square in the center of town, its silent cobblestones, still as the grave. The windows of the grocery, black as an old woman’s sleep. I would show him life after a summer sunset in Adam’s Bridge. The wind in the cypress trees, the old railway bridge. Then we’d walk around town and look in house windows at families watching television, sitting like sarcophagi on sofas, staring straight into a flickering box. I’d show him eleven-P-M in your average American bedroom: the married couple, two pillows, two heads, the hand on a shoulder, the peck on the lips, the brief consideration of what it would be to remove one’s clothing, to conjure the desire. We’d walk until we found a young couple somewhere, up on a fire escape, a brand new pair, and I’d show him how things begin, how we think they’ll always be, how at first it’s so easy, how it all just kind of happens in those early weeks and months, those first days when you talk and talk and barely eat, when street corners turn to monuments, when nobody looks at the time or sleeps quite enough, and how that’s a good thing, to not sleep enough, how it coats the mind in a pleasant fuzz that makes you smile in the middle of meetings.

And then I’d show him the early mornings: Fonz blinking at me as I wake, chimes from the clock tower drifting in through an open window. I’d show him how alarm clocks work, that robotic beep. I’d play for him the sunny wake-up tones on my phone. I’d show him the tea kettle. I’d let him try on my robe. I would take him on a tour, this hunky mutton-faced creature, of couples in their bedrooms staring at their phones. This is civilization, I would tell him. This is what you’ll come to.

This is an excerpt from a sci-fi novel-in-progress by award-winning author Shanthi Sekaran, set in a world where women past a certain age lose all their memories. We are honored to have this exclusive preview excerpt featured in 580 Split.

Bio

Shanthi Sekaran’s most recent novel, Lucky Boy was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. Her essays and stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, and the LA Review of Books. She’s an AWP mentor, and teaches writing at Mills College.

Four Poems

Catherine Wagner

Bio

Catherine Wagner’s collections of poems include Nervous Device (2012), My New Job (2009), Macular Hole (2004), Miss America (2001); and a dozen chapbooks, including Imitating (Leafe Press, 2004). She has performed widely in the U.S., England and Ireland; her poems and essays have appeared in Abraham Lincoln, Lana Turner, New American Writing, 1913, How2, Cambridge Literary Review, Soft Targets, Action, Yes, and other magazines. An anthology she co-edited with Rebecca Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, was published by Fence in 2007. She is associate professor of English at Miami University in Ohio.

Work

Four Poems

Issue 21: Breach

English is 99% buckled to a rock

Should we change language
In sedimentary, metamorphic, or igneous fashion?

I propose to yoke it
To the underside of a life

Also to the inside and the other side of the life
We can attach English anywhere

For like an emotion or a military rank
English takes up no space

Though my voice exists in time and space
A public-private partnership

It hums out local air that’s moved
Presumably everywhere

Full of yeasts and stream toxins
Egg in its testes like an Ohio frog

You are

foreclosed not by my senses five

my senses five deliver
all you are to me
to me

but there’s more you that’s not for me—
not closed to me nor open to me
but twisted into focus by other lenses

other people’s. Just look at you, my girl. They do.

You are part of the.

Every oh 21 days now
the eggs come down

in case of use,
last chances to conceive,

cycle speeds up, egg
drop soup my unused protein floats

down sewer to sea, eventually to be
sucked into animal construction.

If you aren’t part of the
solution, dis

solve for x: turn into an oyster—filter
phosphates, nitrates,

ammonia, bacteria, plankton
into pellets of harmless nitrogen.

Be brilliant machine.
Keep water clean.

But when the sea turns acid
I can’t build my shell!

Some jellyfish invisible by day
do phosphoresce in darkness.

They could hurt you and be hurt
if you mined them for the phosphorus

that burns the skin in war.
Signs of aging on my human body

are live gifs of the Age.
My boyfriend’s visiting

so I feed the gifs to private
spermcast. Later, wakeful,

I troll for massive breasts
online, find pictures

of Denise Milani
and the two large gellies

sewed onto her chest.
Milani’s name and image

seduced a brilliant physics professor
into smuggling drugs. The real Milani

did not swindle him—she knew naught of him—
but her grand breasts each bigger than her head

struck from the float, set free in pixels,
knocked him out. Photons triggered cum.

Jellies have no brains,
float blindly,

but they can fall asleep, can shed
nerve toxins to defend the colony, and

triggered by light
at dawn or dusk

their see-thru pump-domes
simulcast eggs and sperm

into tolerant solution.
I am a poet so I

light and gelatin from varied sources
synth,

sample rain or
reign, stop wheel

at any point in cycle
to gel my case.

Researchers built a working jellyfish
of silicon and rat-heart muscle

to test heart meds: a fat lab boob
you can’t suck on, professor,

nor milk for gelid silicone
nonreactive.

Rub your cock till it gets hard, professor—
pigs can’t do that! only primates

manually self-stim
their privates. I watch an infomercial

in which a male hand strokes and presses a boar’s crotch
till eighteen-inch cock unfurls,

fat drinking straw for “milking” sperm.
The boar would prefer a sow in heat

but the sows are in jail
so the male hand

snaps plastic vagina (lined with plastic
bag) onto cock

and leaves the boar
in private. The boar

for some minutes, fills big bag.
Gate opens. Boar departs,

male hand removes vagina from its clamp
on metal sawhorse sow.

Pigs left to mate at will might mate
with pigs that don’t yield prime bacon,

might mate with sexy pigs, jovial
pigs, smart pigs.

A strange boar’s cream
puffs up the chosen sow.

My nerves aglow. Not sexually though—
it’s going to take awhile to get me going,

couple weeks till ovulation—so
I look at purple pictures

of a portuguese man-o’-war.
It’s a siphonophore,

colonial organism that can clone itself,
translucent head, wet bead curtain

blown. When breakers break,
the sea solution—though held down

by massive sea-meniscus—
rises up to shed weak bonds.

Bunny Slippers Made of Real Bunnies

Would be warm.
Would they be alive?
Not for long.
Though they would be warmer if they were alive.
Warmer for whom?
Think of the bunnies.
Try to think
Of others, all
Fur you.

Bio

Catherine Wagner’s collections of poems include Nervous Device (2012), My New Job (2009), Macular Hole (2004), Miss America (2001); and a dozen chapbooks, including Imitating (Leafe Press, 2004). She has performed widely in the U.S., England and Ireland; her poems and essays have appeared in Abraham Lincoln, Lana Turner, New American Writing, 1913, How2, Cambridge Literary Review, Soft Targets, Action, Yes, and other magazines. An anthology she co-edited with Rebecca Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, was published by Fence in 2007. She is associate professor of English at Miami University in Ohio.

Someplace Else

Sally Ryhanen

Bio

Sally’s words have been honored in local and international competitions and regularly presented by professional actors in Adelaide, South Australia. She meanders through a Bachelor of Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia and co-habits with an antique, Finnish marathon champion and two borrowed budgerigars.

Work

Someplace Else

Issue 21: Breach

Back to a wall. Roll the spine, suck in concrete.

It will pass. It will.

I watch Dee break down from a distance, watch her pull the colors and shapes of her soul apart. Her song scorches the street, scattering the normal people. They gasp into safe clucking corners of the mall. Cardboard coffees wave in our direction, sacred icons against her screams.

Anchor. Cut roots deep into the ground. Inhale the earth. I am a giant, immovable. If I am not, my daughter will sweep the flagstone streets with me.

‘You’re okay, Dee. You are… alright.’ My voice is out of tune, weak.

‘Trick her brain, Hannah,’ the doctors had said, ‘tell your daughter she is alright, alright…’ ‘Autistics don’t really feel emotion.’ Slap. On went the label. Pluck. Out flew the packaged crap.

But what went wrong today? Can I rewind the record, darling Dee, change the music?

I am here for the music, for Dee, like her father had been. Downtown in Louisville, we are tucked away under Galvin’s dark green canopy with its zippy waiters nodding distant love to our girl. This is Abe and Dee’s special place on the fringe of the Bluegrass Festival, where she can catch meandering threads from banjos and guitars. Dee needs this distance, far from the rainbow flags cracking in the air and the stamping, hooting crowd at the far end of the mall.

‘Sorry ma’am… but…?’ A man edges in.

Smile Hannah, stand tall, spread calm. It is ordinary.

‘Can I… er… help?’ Peppermint breath tickles my face; the man is too close. The distraction wilts me. I keep my eyes on Dee but flick a smile for the stranger. Take off Superman, you’ll only mess up.

‘Thank you, sir, no. You’re kind, but please do not look at my daughter. Keep your eyes on me and walk away.’

‘But…’

‘Now.’

My back is bleeding into the wall. I plead. ‘Her father will be here soon. She’ll stop then.’

‘Music don’t lie girl, but people do.’ Abe’s mantra bites me.

‘Please go, sir, and don’t look at her.’ Dig deeper Hannah or fly away. Dismissing him, I call to Dee.

‘Need a little sugar in your bowl, honey? Dee?’ I can’t find the right tone; my voice rises but it’s too thin.

‘Sing our little girl home woman, give her those Bessie Smith Blues.’

Sweet-Breath Superhero, with love, light, and I-must-interfere in his eyes, defies me and gapes at Dee. The words ‘don’t look’ lit up his brain. It’s like when you crave chocolate. If you say, ‘don’t think about chocolate’ the sound of ‘choc-o-late’ will fill your mouth with decadence and swell in your throat, ’til you will rob, murder and maim to get chocolate. Compelled to look now, the stranger’s eyes consume Dee, with no more choice than a starving man gorging on pigswill. I swear people get off watching my girl’s pain.

Dee sees the enchanted onlooker. Not through her eyes; they are filled with her own fists. One at a time, alternate. One then two. One then two. Bash. Slam. Thump. Hammer. Smashing down to free her own music. But her other sense sees the stranger, absorbs him.

A gift or a curse? People of her kind, they say, get 40 channels at once. They see, hear, smell, sense you, me, him, them, it and it and it. They can’t work the remote.

I take a step and put myself between Dee and Superman.

I lose the wall. I lose the earth. So be it.

She comes at me, sightless.

The man runs away with his sweet mouth shaping silent obscenities. Someone else hit 911.

The Georgetown Community hospital know us well. We don’t need to come here much when her father is around. When Abe is here, he tricks the air that batters Dee in these moments, weaving music, poems, and love. Medicos talk about triggers; Abe works in ‘lost soul notes’.

‘Dee… honey, listen, I’ve got that sad ol’ soul, it can’t hurt anymore sugar. It’s in my guitar. I’m playing it away… it’s beautiful now, listen.’ Her misery becomes a feathered dandelion, sung away on a breeze. I have stood between them to feel the pulse that he takes and turns and lets go. I’ll hang there and see, sense, understand… nothing.

Angels haunt our ER, not nurses, and by Christ they can laugh. I want my God to be female, a stand-up comedian.

‘Dee,’ our angel croons, ‘I’m gonna put you up against that baaaaad arse man who’s messin’ up our almighty U.S. of A. Trumpet him off darlin’, wham bam, thank you, ma’am. We’ll pay you a million.’ The nurse is coming at me with a steel bowl of surgical goodies. ‘Now girl, let’s hug your Mom here and we’ll do the embroidery on her face first. She loves you, Dee.’

The nurse threads a needle through my skin and Dee stares at it from her chair. I try so damn hard not to flinch, not to trigger her. Not to be normal. Pick the autistic here guys, me, or her? Laughter gets garrotted before it can bellow out my mouth, proclaiming insanity.

Sometimes an ugly soul of a nurse will watch and whisper, ‘Again? Jesus! Section the damn girl, put her away.’

‘Don’t even think about it, our girl stays with us.’ Pardon Abe? I can’t hear you anymore.

Whenever Abe is AWOL, ‘the question’ waits at the hospital exit, like a loyal doorman. ‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He sang himself away sweetheart. Remember?’

‘Need a little sugar in my bowl, Mom.’

‘Yes, I know Dee, I know. Let’s go home.’

Home can be tough, with and without Abe. Dee was eight-years-old the first time he walked out.

‘It’s enough. No more. I am a muso.’

It was that simple and that wrong.

Can people be just one thing in their life? Can’t I be a trapeze artist and a mother if I want? I’ve forgotten how to do that, though: want. Don’t get me wrong, there are beautiful times. Times when I shine because my girl is all kinds of awesome. Like at school… she’s a champion. Telephone calls from school make my day, mostly from Mrs Rowe the principal. ‘She’s the Trumpet, Mom.’ Dee can’t explain why Mrs Rowe is a Trumpet. Loud, in your face perhaps, likes to take the solo? Whatever, Dee sure knows how to play that Trumpet. The calls kick in with, ‘Mrs Asher… Mrs Rowe here… no, no it’s nothing bad…’ and last Monday the story was ‘… only Dee’s stuck in a solo again. How can we nudge her along?’ God, I love my girl, she makes that school work for their trophies. She’s always a step ahead.

‘What’s she singing?’

‘She’s in fine voice, Mrs Asher, but we need to go for a banking training session. It’s…’ she flounders.

‘On the Road Again?’ I offer.

Mrs Rowe grunts, hating to be behind tempo.

‘Willie Nelson style, leave-me-here-I’m-happy, or a Canned Heat version, I’m-too-cool-for-school-I’m-running-away-again, Mrs Rowe?’

‘Without the benefit of your musical background, Mrs Asher, I’d suggest the former, Willie Nelson, as she’s smiling.’

I laugh down the phone. This one’s easy for me.

‘She’s just content to stay in the classroom. Ask her what she’s saving for. There’s a picture of a guitar in her diary. That’ll get her out to the bank.’

‘Okay.’ A dying fly fizzes in the telephone line.

I yell at the ceiling. ‘Thanks for the help Mrs Asher… you are amazing. You deserve a medal, Mrs Asher, champagne… a lifelong trip above the world in an airship, Mrs Asher, forever free?’ But it’s not about me I suppose; the school is good for Dee. It does its best, has a go at rearranging the fragmented mosaic of her mind. Mrs Rowe, God bless her, is its super glue. But she claims the prizes when any kid tip-toes towards the normal end of ‘special’. Mothers – yep it is mostly mothers who hang around – seem to count for zilch. Sometimes even, you are the enemy. There’s always a dig or two at pick-up time, like last week.

‘A wonderful morning with Dee, Mrs Asher, but the afternoon…’ I scan the room for my girl, my toes curling into the floor, ready. ‘We accept that life is ultra-busy for all our parents, but could we mention again the healthy eating programme, certain foods…?’

‘Chocolate, you mean chocolate.’

‘Well yes, such a behaviour changer, Mrs Asher.’

Sure is a behaviour changer, sweetheart. It can stop a left hook at 20 paces. ‘Hey, Dee,’ I’d dodged the slap that morning, ‘here’s Mr Goodbar for school, catch, darling, catch.’

‘That cheeky Dee, did she sneak chocolate into her bag again, Mrs Rowe?’

As I tuned out the Trumpet that afternoon, I watched my girl cross the classroom. Dee is larger than other kids but looks great on the days she lets me brush her hair and get her buttons right. Abe loves her crushed up mane… loves it to be ‘… free and wild woman, she must be free.’ With his copper skin and my daisy-yellow hair, our girl is a sun-bound flower, a downright-too-delicious-to-be-real-flower that blossoms when its sky is bright. Damn near stops my heart when I catch her smile. But when her sun goes down, she shrivels. I can’t always reckon what her sun looks like to bring it back. Abe can taste its shape, its melody, its warmth and he knows where it hides.

He gave our baby girl language through song.

She’s a Cute Thing… tapping, smiling, singing, her fine fingers quick and gentle on her dress…

… scatting, T’ain’t nobody’s biz-ness if I do, unblinking eyes under a curtain of curls…

… open hands drumming our creped oak table…

… on bad days she might wail Dreaming… slamming a chair into the wall’s deepening scars…

… now a Sweet Black Angel, beating time with her body against our glass door… to a shattering finale.

Maybe the psychs are right. Perhaps Abe duck-shoves his own emotions over to our girl, knowing she is empty. Anyhow, Abe says I don’t know either of them. ‘You’re out of tune with my life’ are the only lyrics he leaves me, each time he runs. I miss the cues they both give me, like the loser kid stuck way outside the band, holding a triangle and silver wand high… praying, sweating, counting then… missing. Always fucking missing. Without Abe, Dee is too often my sweet black angel.

I didn’t remember much after Abe walked out the first time. Dee searched the rooms for his funny upside-down-mop body. Stick-thin jangling limbs, topped with grizzled dreadlocks falling into his face. Distracted, he left his dope stash in my knicker drawer. I seemed to sit awhile in Starbucks. ‘Another cup, Ma’am?’ Baristas think out loud when you’re stoned. ‘You can’t fool me woman, I see you, pretending. These strangers are your friends, I’m your family. Sitting is your job. It’s okay girl, it’s okay.’

I went home sometime. A neighbour smashed in the front door, sometime. Dee and her hunger beat me. Meals missed… nine, ten? She let the whole damn neighbourhood know when our fridge was empty. They took my kid away. Child abuse they said. Funny that, as it was me with the broken bones. It took a while to feel. Dope is a magic blanket.

A social worker held my hand, the unbroken one, as she led me through the queues of people-like-me in her office. A musk of earth and burnt popcorn still clung to my skin, the tell-tale smell people smile at or turn away from, as you try to make like normal in your day.

‘If you don’t give her up to the State, Hannah, they will take her anyway.’ I never called this woman by her first name. I never called her anything. I didn’t like her using my first name, but didn’t say so. ‘This way you’ll get some control. Isn’t that important for you, Hannah?’ There she goes again.

The State found Abe in Washington, far away from our Kentucky bluegrass land. He yelled and screamed to get his beautiful daughter ‘… outta that stinkin’ cesspit.’

‘No, Mr Asher, your child is not in prison, as you say.’

‘What’s that fucking electric fence for then mister, to keep cows out?’

They signed Dee out to him, but not to me. I’m the ‘abuser’.

The three of us danced around each other when they sent us home. A slow, blues beat. Abe claimed the solos, the hero of our dead little trio. His eyes would move over my body some days. Most times though Dee claimed him, sitting, standing, swaying; near enough to take the breath of his music right into her soul.

Cymbals crashed in the morning gig of bourbon bottles jettisoned to the trash. He was distant and tired on dope, but the Wild Turkey got him jagged and fast. I was too tired and slow to dance away from his fury. The paramedics know our house, know me, know Dee. It was easy for Abe to shrug, palms outstretched and mutter our daughter’s name when they asked what happened. Silent, they trussed me up into their meat van like a piece of brisket.

‘Now, honey, I love your girl like my own but it’s ‘bout time you popped her a little happy pill or two or she gonna kill you.’

My throat tightened as the nurse assumed my girl smashed into me again.

‘Hey Hannah, what I done said wrong? Don’t give me that evil eye.’ She flipped a tepid laugh, glancing behind me. ‘Where is that girl of yours anyhow… who’s she with?’

You can choke on words. The nurse spun me round and belted me with a tough medical punch straight between the shoulder blades. It knocked me onto the bed, but I could breathe again. The fist dislodged the words ‘Abe did it’, alongside an avalanche of self-loathing. The nurse took me and held me like I had just been born.

‘I’ll get the goddam law girl.’ Rock and a hard place here.

‘Tell ‘em and you’re down the Swanee, woman,’ he’d whispered, before the paras took me. ‘They’ll get Dee. You’ve got six months of that probation stuff, no chance letting you alone with our girl.’

I neglected my child they said. Didn’t matter Abe’d up and flown away first. Forgetting to ever come home seems neglectful to me. Forgetting not to beat the crap out of me again seemed a bit neglectful too.

The musos had changed key when I got home from hospital. Dee had been at school when Abe’s rage moved from his eyes to his fists, so she couldn’t know what happened. But you sense a shift, when the singers play around with your best song; a few extra chords, a change of pace. All that was going down in our house. Same but different.

Dee touched my face that night.

I hadn’t meant to push her, it was a reflex, a defence, ‘I am so sorry Dee, you made me jump. Come here sweetheart.’

She’d never wanted to touch me before. My body softened as her fingertips reached out and grazed across my cheek, close to the stitches by my left eye. She traced the colors of the bruise down my face, then walked away. Abe strummed, guitar across his knee like a baby, head bowed, playing into himself. There weren’t any sounds between him and I. But Dee turned her back on him as she sang. I was moving and cooking and cleaning, but I swear she was singing to me.

She touched me again the next day, on the way to school. I held the wheel of the car one handed, slow, easy riding in the traffic build up. My right arm rested down on the seat. She started a rhythm, with one finger, on my wrist.

An unspoiled breath came from someplace deep in my body. That breath, the moment your baby shows you… tells you, she knows who you are.

Abe would have picked up her song, a cheap game show winner, pressing the bell and crying out the answer, arms raised, calling for the love. But the skin at the end of Dee’s whip-smart finger knew I was listening.

At the school gates, she up and ambled away, but I sat. Right then there was no place else to be.

Bio

Sally’s words have been honored in local and international competitions and regularly presented by professional actors in Adelaide, South Australia. She meanders through a Bachelor of Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia and co-habits with an antique, Finnish marathon champion and two borrowed budgerigars.

Variations on Hold

Lisa Ludden

Bio

Lisa Ludden is the author of the chapbook Palebound (Flutter Press, 2017). A finalist for the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2018, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Stonecoast Review, Permafrost, Natural Bridge, MockingHeart Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her first full-length book of poetry.

Work

Variations on Hold

Issue 21: Breach

Held: to enclose and keep within bounds

Where water begins clean. A soft run off.

Silt gentle between her toes and fingers, soaking

prey still, his beak at her neck, the plunge of her

submerged head, legs thrash until

they don’t, until the body’s slack softening

is seen as a murmured yes from deep below.

Hold: to have possession or ownership of

Arched body in waiting.

Her solitude disrobed

at the banks’ edge. Held

down by a winged beast,

not beast, but bird,

not rape, seduction,

not shudder, tremble.

Not me, but someone like me.

Holding: to bear the pressure of

What if we gave Leda the feathers?

Gathered down, Zeus’ discard in haste

or leisure. Hold them to her skin used raw,

wishing she was the duckling unseen

in tufts of grass and shrub, overlooked

in a child landscape of story. Twig bodied,

barked skin cuts hands rough in reply.

No longer a body softened

by wanting.

Bio

Lisa Ludden is the author of the chapbook Palebound (Flutter Press, 2017). A finalist for the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2018, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Stonecoast Review, Permafrost, Natural Bridge, MockingHeart Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her first full-length book of poetry.

Two Poems from “for now we know in part”

linda harris dolan

Bio

Linda Harris Dolan is a poet, editor, and professor. She holds an M.A. in English & American Literature, and an M.F.A in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Starworks Creative Writing Fellow. She’s taught at Rutgers University and NYU. She’s a 2016 Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee.

Work

Two Poems from “for now we know in part”

Issue 21: Breach

in a patriarchal world. 3.

in the waiting rooms for the heart failure doctors,

there are always mostly middle-aged men.

*

if this is a story about a girl

learning to be a girl

in a world of

men

it is also this:

*

i was twenty-one for my first echocardiogram.

atria: slightly enlarged.

maybe this was the shape of my heart.

however: harris heart.

and anyway, they didn’t have the studies, they didn’t have the national research to show

what this heart might look like. in a woman.

who should make the space?

is it up to me to wade in, shove my foot
into the mud, lie down, press down
until it envelopes?

our bodies are only living things.
only organisms–muscles, blood.
if we squat, it’s easier to defecate, or give birth.
muscles work a certain way, shoulders sit on blades.
—and yet

within these all so specifically arranged,

someone touches the middle-top of my shoulder,
says, relax here.

will you touch your shoulder,
find a space for me?

i’ll be here a while.
squatting. and feelings.
i think if i can get them all out—

Author's note: these two poems are from my manuscript, 'for now we know in part.' The project focuses on tracking my family's pervasive heart disease through the generations and down to me—focusing on multigenerational loss, the dilemmas brought by advancing medical treatments, and the navigations of life in a sick body.

Bio

Linda Harris Dolan is a poet, editor, and professor. She holds an M.A. in English & American Literature, and an M.F.A in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Starworks Creative Writing Fellow. She’s taught at Rutgers University and NYU. She’s a 2016 Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee.

Arroyo

Anindita Sengupta

Bio

Anindita Sengupta is a writer in Los Angeles. She is author of City of Water (Sahitya Akademi) and Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall.in). Her writing has appeared in Plume, The Guardian, One, Breakwater Review and others. She has received fellowships / awards from Charles Wallace Trust, International Reporting Project, TFA India and Muse India.

Work

Arroyo

Issue 21: Breach

At the mouth

of the dry creek, the bird

is a carousel. Encircling

these swells is a heliotrope,

a vast city of love

and oil drills. Memorizing

the design is forbidden

but we get glimpses

as of a freeway

through a veil of leaves

where cars do their continual dance,

speedy and patient.

From here, a painting.

From here, an angel in jeans

who swears a lot.

We’re a circus. An immanence

of axes. Asked to commit,

we populate sky with Geranium.

Think of it as soil.

We’re afraid of a good burying.

The heart knows its borders,

knows to take off shoes

and raise hands

You, on the other hand, I.

Any moment, the wind.

Any moment, a brushfire.

Bio

Anindita Sengupta is a writer in Los Angeles. She is author of City of Water (Sahitya Akademi) and Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall.in). Her writing has appeared in Plume, The Guardian, One, Breakwater Review and others. She has received fellowships / awards from Charles Wallace Trust, International Reporting Project, TFA India and Muse India.

Winter Sun

Shannon Brazil

Bio

Shannon Brazil’s therapist once told her, “Nobody’ll ever accuse you of being a simple woman.” Shannon is the recipient of a Literary Arts Special Fellowship for Women Writers. Her prose appears in Hip Mama Magazine, Nailed Magazine, and The Manifest-Station. Shannon loves cephalopods.

Work

Winter Sun

Issue 21: Breach

Winter Sun is my Mistress. She calls to my blood, a billion cells loud. Climb to the highest point, she says.

Spread wide your limbs, North and South.

Lift your face to mine. Unhinge your mouth.

Wait.

We’re in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada, my lover and me, surrounded by Aztec sandstone and big sky. Winter Sun lights silver in my lover’s charcoal hair. He’s in sneakers and thick-framed eye glasses. I’m in my favorite hiking boots, the ones that love to climb.

We’re former East-Coasters. Me, with my attitude. Him, with his intellect. Sometimes when I look at my lover I imagine what it’d be like to lick the very top of his brain. Would the left hemisphere taste creamier than the right.

Custard.

Only smarter.

We turn right at the sign marked Calico Tanks. My lover speaks trail math, something-something distance plus time. It’s addition. It’s subtraction. It’s nothing I hear. Not while there’s shale under foot, percussion in each step. The blood-call of my mistress, rich with oxygen and hope.

I’m so fucking grateful to be out of Northwest gray, my heart might split.

Past the natural fire pit where the ancients roasted tortoise, rabbit, and agave for hours or days. Where they came to feast, dance, celebrate. Where the earth told stories, and her people listened.

Once upon an age, this canyon was under the water. I stoop to touch the water’s mark, and bits of earth left behind. Silt, heavy in my hands. Salt, mud, limestone, sandstone, ground to red-orange dust. I want to wash my face with it. Scrub it against my skin, pour it over my head, let it spill down my front, my back.

Let it red me in sacrifice.

The trail is populated. I let the dust slip soft and slow through my fingers. My empty hands still feel the red.

We find footholds and handholds, my lover and me. Scrabble ourselves up and over rock again and again, and, my god, I could do this for days. Past gypsum and Juniper. And it occurs to me I may have discovered a new exclamation: Gypsum and Juniper, I could do this for days!

She calls. I press on.

I was not suited for the tyranny of gray, its eight-month reign of rain.

At the first tank we realize the Calico Tanks aren’t decommissioned towers, but natural pools of run-off. The first one is a small dip in a limestone flat. Shallow water shaded from Mistress — it stays all season. Cold to the touch. Algae slime on my fingertips and a slight murk, but otherwise clean enough for animals to drink.

The next ascent presents us with rows and rows of the most exquisite pattern, wave-marks in a huge sandstone shelf, chest-high. Tight curvy grooves, where the water came through, hundreds of grooves in uniform. I want to feel each ridge with my tongue.

Palms flat along the ridges, my finger in each groove. That’s when it dawns on me.

I know this pattern. The feel of it. The shape.

Dark bands in an estrogen tunnel. The pads of two fingers, index and middle, wet. Come hither. The shape my hand touches in nature is the same shape that occurs in women. My veins catch fire all over again. Red.

My friend Bradley once asked why everything goes back to sex with me. I didn’t have an answer then, but I think I do now.

It’s not sex. Sex is incidental.

My true North is sensual.

It’s how I relate to the world of bodies, how I commune with what’s inside the skin of all things, the on top and underneath, that is my sex. My sex is the union of fingers and hands, hearts and tongues, but mostly, it’s the custard I sniff out first.

I love the canteen against my lips, water-spill cool down my neck, between my breasts, under my black windbreaker. Gravel under my boot. It feels like who cares. Feels like I slosh water everyday on this here trail. And there’s a deer in the clouds, horns stretching from buck to stag before my eyes. And there’s wet in my windbreaker. And me—

My lover tells me to pick up the pace or we’ll never make it.

I don’t even know what that means. He’s got some sort of goal in mind.

I make believe haste. The treads of my boots grip fast and sure up a stairway carved of rock. And when I’ve passed him, when I’m sure he’s good and distracted back there, struggling to find his footing and a thornless path, just so, I quick veer onto a parallel path. I spy through sage brush and Yucca, and wait. My lover shades his eyes when he sees I’ve disappeared. Stands tiptoe. Looks forward. Looks back. Looks forward. Back. And I’m hands-over-mouth nose-laughing when I accidentally rustle the Yucca. He studies the rustled bush, squints. My giggles give me away. My lover shakes his fist, why-I-oughta.

Teasing this man is one of my favorite pastimes.

I can’t help it if he has a natural talent for walking into all of my jokes.

The deer in the sky is long gone, aged out, and replaced by witches. Hats and brooms. A coven in flight. My lungs absorb more oxygen under this desert blue than any Northwest gray. Northwest gray dampens my dry. Slows me to still. But here, my Mistress sings the azures of blue. The rusts of orange. The crimsons of red. Weightless colors, colors—

And oh my god color song interrupted! Again with the note of time and I don’t mean strata. My lover is obsessed with wrist watches and pace-keeping. His pack, a bounty of dried fruits and nuts, an array of ointments and oral medications, phone cords, and half a dozen electrical adaptors for all the continents. Darkness is far off. This trail is crowded with hikers. The gates won’t close until every one of us has exited. My lover cannot hear these words. My lover comes from screeching trains and utility lines.

We square-off next to one of the oldest trees in the canyon, a bristlecone pine. Brown-red branches spiraling out of a hairline-crack in the limestone, it reaches up and over the cliff toward the basin far below. I wrap my hand around one of its limbs, catch my breath, and I hate to do it, I really do, but I real-talk my lover. Because he’s been known to miss a social cue or four.

I Boston-tell the New York-him how it’s gonna be: I’m going forward. With or without you. I won’t stop until I reach the end. Until I answer her call. My Mistress will fill me. She will mend the 145 consecutive days of rain that brought us here.

There’s something about my lover’s salt and pepper hair, the lines of his skin, the shape and straightness of his teeth that draws me in. I love him for three or four big reasons, and ten thousand small ones.

That he lets go of his math, is one. But I don’t tell him that.

There’s a lot I don’t say, on and off this trail. I don’t tell him that I’m under the command of Winter Sun, that I won’t stop until I’ve reached the highest point, until my limbs are spread wide North and South, until I’ve done exactly what she has asked of me. Until I’m healed.

I’m quiet.

When I’m quiet I almost pass for normal.

I’m not, of course. Because there’s no such thing. But I don’t tell them that, the everyones. Here, my body is alive, pulsing, working. Here, my body is all grip and pull, knee and bicep. My body is muscle and tendon, strength and will. A human animal spirit feasting forward.

I hoist myself up to see the final tank, the biggest of all. A swimming hole, one hundred feet down, effaced on three sides, tangled jags on the forth. Crow medicine flies low! A good sign.

We reach the high and narrow pass, the trickiest part of the climb. The couple catching their breath turns back, because this reminds them of the place where Saul had a heart attack, and how it took five whole hours to get him out and airlifted to the hospital. There’s an alternate route, longer but not as risky, or as rewarding. They don’t take it. We hear the voices disappear down the steep decline. Blood skitters under my skin. I kick my boot-treads free of stray stones. I’m ready.

Winter Sun, up, up, and around. The final bend.

My lover goes first. His sneakers mold to the boulder’s contour. Agile steps fast across the pass then his two flat feet are, at once, on the cliff’s landing. He makes it look easier than it is. The crow is perched cliffside on the limb of the Mariposa beneath us. Crow turns to me, her black eyes on mine, and I consider digging for my camera-phone, way deep in my pack. But also, I consider that I’m standing on a ledge, not wide enough for one sideways foot at at time. I’ve seen crow medicine before. I know the magic she brings.

Change. A message from the other side. Keep going.

My arms and legs hug the sandstone wall. I might do this anyway, commune with this rock, but for now it’s to prevent me from hurtling down the side of this ravine. Belly to boulder, my lower intestines shift sick. I pretend the height out of my head. My mouth goes dry with nerves. I’m starting to lose my breath. Then the wind kicks up. Its gust pelts my face with flying pebbles and dirt. I squeeze shut my eyes and my mouth. Wind, harder still. I’m unsteady, fingernails clawing for holds in the rock. My lover’s faraway voice.

“You’ve got this,” he says. “Give me your hand!”

His toes hug the edge of the landing, his hand reaches around the rock’s curve. He’s older than me. I know the veins of his hand, the bones of his wrist, the hair on his arms. I know the scent of his skin. Clove oil, eight drops. The way each of his fingers stroke my body. The way his palm holds my cheek when I sleep.

Eyes closed, the wind keeps on. Debris keeps on. I fumble for my sunglasses. Hold on with one hand, and where did I put them, where could they be. Cheek to rock, fingers shaking, they’re in the front zip pocket of my windbreaker. I can only just get them out. I can only just get them onto my face. Blackout lenses. No, it’s that my eyes are still closed, and the wind is trying to force me off of the pass. I think crow.

My lover hollers, “Give me your hand!”

But I can’t.

I’m more afraid of help than I am of falling.

On and off this trail.

I don’t see crow when she lifts from her perch, but I hear her cry on the wind. I feel her medicine behind me. Three points. A triangle. Me on the ledge, the crow on the wind, Winter Sun in the sky. Conductors of energy. Arms, belly, breasts pressed flat against rock, inch by inch my feet creep along, until I make it to the place of my lover’s outstretched hand. I don’t take his hand. I leap.

On safe ground, he pats my back twice, comrade style. My lungs and throat still catching in black rushes of wind.

“I was afraid,” I say.

“I know you were.”

My lover knows I’d reach for him if I could. Still, he keeps a hand out always. Just in case.

At the highest point, where sky is bigger than land, and land touches horizon, the Vegas strip is but a series of indistinct dots. Collective congratulations all around. It was worth it, we all agree. Look at this view, we say.

Winter Sun is bright on the North face of the canyon. I stand in her reservoir of light. Spread wide my arms, my legs. Unhinge my mouth. Open my throat to her.

I wait.

She pours herself over my teeth and tongue, down my gullet, into the empty well of my Northwest stomach. Sun cells filling my veins, my skin. Sun cells spilling out of me in every direction. Fountains of light.

My Mistress. My sun. My reward.

Skin scintillating glimmer-glom.

Hold me safe through rain’s relentless color pallet. Flint, slate, pewter, smoke. Colors that compliment my eyes, but drain my spirit. 900 miles from here, I’d never been so low. Not since I was a teenager. Stay with me, please. Keep me in this canyon, drunk on clear skies and red rock.

Bio

Shannon Brazil’s therapist once told her, “Nobody’ll ever accuse you of being a simple woman.” Shannon is the recipient of a Literary Arts Special Fellowship for Women Writers. Her prose appears in Hip Mama Magazine, Nailed Magazine, and The Manifest-Station. Shannon loves cephalopods.

I am waiting for a terrible sentence to begin

Conor Mc Donnell

Bio

Conor Mc Donnell is a Toronto poet who recently published two chapbooks in Canada; The Book of Retaliations, (Anstruther Press), and Safe Spaces, (Frog Hollow Press). In 2018, he was awarded honorable mention in The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and he is hard at work on forthcoming poetry manuscripts.

Work

I am waiting for a terrible sentence to begin

Issue 21: Breach

I am waiting for a terrible sentence to begin

I am waiting for permission

I am waiting for the world to empty

his war chest of ammunition

I am waiting for him to be shoved

naked onto the streets

tonguing a solitary gold tooth for Quixotic-reassurance

I am waiting for bars to fill with traders

speculating on his future

I am waiting for forest and field to reject him

for canopy and tallest corn to consent to the drones

I am waiting for no respite from silent superveillance

I am waiting for ladders to actualize and stilt-walk away

to loiter across alley-mouths like wooden gangs

all leg and tooth and grin

I am waiting for rash to rise from the brand on his buttock

waiting for a shingles belt to lick his haunch like Sticky-Fingered-Hot-Lip

I am waiting for witches

to ascend from stony riverbeds casting reparation spells

I am waiting for the lesson to dawn

to bubble up in passers-by and flood

through social mediums like body-snatcher plagues

I am waiting for this anger to form something more than outrage

I am waiving my consent

Bio

Conor Mc Donnell is a Toronto poet who recently published two chapbooks in Canada; The Book of Retaliations, (Anstruther Press), and Safe Spaces, (Frog Hollow Press). In 2018, he was awarded honorable mention in The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and he is hard at work on forthcoming poetry manuscripts.

Cora Jaeshke

Bio

Cora is an illustrator, painter, and aspiring animator based in the Bay Area. Having lived all over California with her father and sisters who had a strong liking for drawing, comics, movies and fine art culture, there grew a strong love for creating things. On entering high school turning her passion into a career. Cora was given her first studio at the age of 14 where she painted and sculpted. This then sparked her interest in figurative drawing, comics, animation, and digital Illustration. While going to school at Huntington Beach high school they offered extensive art classes. Studying entertainment art, commercial art, life drawing, sculpting etc. To further her skill set she took on precollege courses at Laguna College of Art and Design her senior year. After graduating she decided to take on the reins of the bay area scene. Currently she is residing in Berkeley and is a full time freelancer in character design, comic book illustration, multimedia storyboards and mural installation. While continuing her studies Illustration at Academy of Art University.

Work

Patience

Issue 21: Breach

Patience

Bio

Cora is an illustrator, painter, and aspiring animator based in the Bay Area. Having lived all over California with her father and sisters who had a strong liking for drawing, comics, movies and fine art culture, there grew a strong love for creating things. On entering high school turning her passion into a career. Cora was given her first studio at the age of 14 where she painted and sculpted. This then sparked her interest in figurative drawing, comics, animation, and digital Illustration. While going to school at Huntington Beach high school they offered extensive art classes. Studying entertainment art, commercial art, life drawing, sculpting etc. To further her skill set she took on precollege courses at Laguna College of Art and Design her senior year. After graduating she decided to take on the reins of the bay area scene. Currently she is residing in Berkeley and is a full time freelancer in character design, comic book illustration, multimedia storyboards and mural installation. While continuing her studies Illustration at Academy of Art University.

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part 1

part 2

in a patriarchal world. 3.

who should make the space?