What You Do | Eat A Peach

WHAT YOU DO | EAT A PEACH

Do/Peach/At/A/What/You make something. You create, and discuss, and move. You have to move. Stop moving. Dialogue, brought to you by you with you of you in you for you. WHAT YOU DO | EAT A PEACH is, well, that. It’s moving, breathing, coffee stains, and whatnots under your toes. Why not share? Read this. Add to it, and move somewhere. Brilliance is inevitable/inventable/is it? This catalogue is inclusive, not final works intending to be masterpieces or mistresspieces. It’s discussion. Discuss god damn you! Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.

Thank you for picking up the second issue of WhatPeach! We are a Eugene Lang – based literary magazine open to the work of young writers everywhere.

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The Differences Between Being Inside of a Whale and Outside of a Whale: A List

What I Do When I Am Hiding

Belt Buckled Brown Eyed Boy in Boots

Beelen St., Pittsburgh

Family Farm

Exposure Can Cause Serious Health Problems

The Way I Feel

Jumping Rope Is for Queers

Hardcore Napper

And Whitman, If You Really Want To Know Me

Red/White

Roller Derby Baby

Letter Endings

Skull Molding

The Animation (1939)

Visiting

Old Song

Pass Through Me For Awhile

We Men of Science

The Myriad Scales of Frederic Bourdin

Regarding What My Mother Spilt

Siphon

Wood Crimes

22 // Dan Moyer

21 // Anna DeForest

13 // Eleni Tountas

12 // Dena H. Saleh

11 // Taya Kitaysky

10 // Nora Newhouse

9 // Ora Fruchter and Brandon Korch

8 // Spike Schwab

7 // Shane McConnell

6 // Jeanette Anderson

5 // Lauren Nixon

3 // Lauren Elizabeth Scott

2 // Hillary Schneller

1 // Nicole Dular

-1 // Jesse Littlejohn

-3 // Julie Buntin

-4 // Naima Woods

-5 // Jack Ramsey

-13 // Raphael Bob-Waksberg

-15 // Bradford Nicholson

-19 // Amelia Jackie

-21 // Emily Skillings

-22 // Emily Skillings

Contents

The Differences Between Being Inside of a Whale and Outside of a Whale: A List // dan moyer

Number one: Outside of a whale you don’t feel the earth rotating on its axis, nor do you feel the earth rotate around the sun. Inside of a whale, however, you wish the ocean weren’t made out of waves. And then you probably throw up.

Number two: Outside of a whale there are many different sorts of light. These lights include daylight, television, moonlight, dawnlight, a wheat field on fire, the scales of a trout you caught for your dad, a candle burned for the dead, a lit cigarette in the mouth of your lover as she lies next to you in the dark, naked and trembling. And lamps. As well as many others. But inside of a whale there is only one kind of light. It is a lone beam I like to call the “Spoutlight.” It is less light than you need but more than you know you deserve.

Number three: Outside of a whale time can be told by clocks, watches, sundials, blinking VCRs, calendars, wrinkles and the cosmos. Inside of a whale its heartbeat is the only thing that tells time. And all it can tell is that more has passed.

Number four: Outside of a whale there are many, many uses for a nail gun. Inside of a whale, however, there are only six.

Number five: Outside of a whale there are sprinklers you forgot to turn off. There are unwatched movies that need to be returned and shelves of books with dog-ears somewhere in the middle. There are heaps waiting to be heaped and tasks waiting to be tasked. There is a half-dug hole in your backyard where you planned to bury your time capsule but you couldn’t find anything worth leaving inside.

There are unwatered wisterias, a floor piled high with dirty clothes and a list, as tall as a small boy, of all the things he told you to finish and when you’re outside there is all the time in the world to finish them but inside of a whale you wade knee-deep in the feeling, hot and briny, that you’re sure you let him down.

Number six: Outside of a whale there was at least one person worth writing songs for. Inside of a whale there is Jonah.

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What I Do When I Am Hiding // anna deforest

The day I first saw Dr. Robert, I stepped on a woman standing in line at the Central Public Library. “Say ‘excuse me,’” this woman said, and her voice, the edge in it, made me realize it was a human foot that had caught my last unstable step. I told her I was sorry without looking at her face. Whispered I was tired. Or insane. Her shirt was smockish, covered in bright poppies bleeding into one another in such a way that I was leaning, pulled in by its gravity. “I’m sure you are,” she was saying. “Now say ‘excuse me.’” The poppies churning, I could hear her voice go on, but I could not understand the words. A man stepped between us. “It’s already over,” he said, his face forgiving, and his arms, the hair of them, like a barbed-wire fence. Bewildered and grateful, I handed him my books and I left. I got down the steps, I crossed a street that rushed and hummed with the whiz of passing cars. I made it to a field of grass in a public park and I collapsed. I closed my eyes and I stayed just there, still, until Dr. Robert found me. “Why there?” Dr. Robert asks me. The field where the dragonflies grow. I answer honestly. I say, “I don’t know.” He pulled me from my sort of sleep with a hand on my forehead. So long since anyone touched me. But he was a doctor. I remember his face as it looked down on me in the wet, slanty light of morning as vaguely biblical, gently haggard, hard around the edges. What was I doing before that? Dreaming? “I would ask if you’re all right,” he said, “but I’m not in the business of asking stupid questions.” He took me somewhere. Gave me something. Warm, dry clothes. It was later I tried to tell him why, but I never could get the words to fall as heavy as the thought had, that day in the library.

That was early spring. Now autumn is edging in. The leaves haven’t turned, but I can smell it in the air. I am going to the library, and as people pass me, their steps are at once dedicated and indifferent. The sky is bright and clear. This is the sort of day you might want to call beautiful, but it isn’t. It’s depressing. The day seems over-

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exposed. Inside the library it is gracious and dim. Though no one here seems purposeful, the air is tense and because it also smells of disinfectant, it feels like a hospital. I realize at once that I won’t find what I’m looking for here. There’s a faint pull in my stomach, I am not thinking of books. I am thinking of a man I have never seen in this library. I am looking through the stacks at the hands of passing men, searching for his round and oddly vulgar fingers. Outside, a horn sounds so sharply it comes through the closed doors. I am drawn from my longing by the commotion. A cyclist has been struck by a car. The bicycle is under the car’s front wheels, rims just visible, bending out from beneath the fender like the brim of a hat. But the woman, she’s all right. She is standing already, unspoiled beside the car. “It’s okay,” she is saying to the driver, whose face is blank in terror. “It’s okay,” she says again, slowly, and I can hear her. “I know how to fall.”

About love. Dr. Robert says, “Don’t look for it.” But what I dream is between me and my god. Today I am dreaming of Adam. The streets recover quickly from the accident. I watch the woman carry her junked bicycle, watch her wind through the crowd of passing bodies as if she ducked and weaved in her sleep. Real grace is all I mean. The perfection of avoidance. She moved like water. I move like bending tin. I’m sure if anyone around me bothered to look, they could tell in an instant I have no idea where I’m going. “Protect yourself from aimlessness,” Dr. Robert says. “Choose and make choices. To live is to behave like the living.” But the day is still bright and cold and sprawling, and I can’t get my mind to settle on anything but this one man who is always warm to touch. I know this though I swear I’ve never touched him. Heat rolls off him in waves. I walk without agenda, hoping the stern clip of my steps is enough pretending to keep things in line. I want to go to the field like I do most days, but the pull of people seems to want me somewhere else. So I go, scanning, without real dedication, the sea of heads surrounding me for Ad’s particular hair. But everyone is bald today. Today is making fun of me.

20

It’s true I date, despite my better judgment. There are two things I want from this, and they are not compatible. The first is easy. I am always hungry. The hunger for food I feel in my throat, most days so bad it chokes me. But there’s a hunger of another kind, one I feel in my wrists and the soft insides of my elbows. It is a hunger that cries out to touch and be touched. And this is what most of the world is after. I never asked Dr. Robert what to do when I am hungry. But I do, when it can’t be helped, tell him about the men. All of them laughing with their mouths wide open, all of them nothing but teeth. It is fast and sharp, what they want from me. Soon when I look at them all I can see is skin, blotched and tangled with veins and small welts and blisters. They turn corpse to me, already going cold. “What does that mean?” asks Dr. Robert. “Search me,” I say. “That it’s already over?” The other thing I want is impossible.

It was different with Ad. We went on starvation dates. Better than sex as it went without touching. “Tuesday at 10,” the message said, and I would fast three days in advance. We met in a bar, the drinks felt like grain, and we talked up appetites, teasing our desire. “Meatloaf,” he said, “like my mother made. Ground beef rolled with oats and onions.” My mouth dripping. “Garlic,” I said. “Butter.” “Mashed potatoes,” he said and I moaned. When we were full of longing we settled our tab, we came to agreement and we ate. All of my nerves came into my mouth, and I did not think even of my hands as they fed me. As the meal wound down our paces slowed, not for fullness, which was never the goal, but to savor, with oblique glances, the last moments of the other’s enjoyment. When we finished, we were shamed, but our shame was light. We were sated. Afterward we walked to the river to stare at the sky, arms almost touching. We were close as brothers. But we did not know what to do with each other.

“You wanted to go to bed with him,” says Dr. Robert. I don’t tell him so, but he is wrong.

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“To be warm,” he says. “Accepted as a body.” It’s true I used to love to dream of sex. Nothing could make me feel more at a distance. The act was a tunnel I could come out of alone. When I finished I’d impersonate a man. My heart, for once, would be quiet. I would feel selfish and satisfied, and whether I moved or not, I’d get the distinct impression that I was smoking a cigarette, standing near a window. I don’t smoke, but I might like to. Burn things to ash, and blow them away. “It was pizza,” I say. “He paid.” “It’s not money,” says Dr. Robert. “What you want.” I don’t want to suffer. I want to share. It’s true Ad bought the meal. He bought all of them, and I thanked him hard, because that’s what love is: Will you pay for it? And how much will you pay? Because of the cyclist and because my sick heart, I am out of routine today. I am somehow in a coffee place, a place of chairs and low-slung sofas. Somehow it is like a church to me. I get some tea and take a seat. A man across from me is reading a travel guide to someplace European. He lowers it toward me. As my tea is hot and stays hot I test its rim with my lips. The man has a moustache. I look past it widely, trying to seem to ignore him. All of the bodies here are scattered preciously, less like people than props. Each of them is publicly private, busy. I wish I had a magazine. My idleness is a defect. Above the moustache the man’s eyes are cold. But my tea is warm, and I am warm, and tense but nearly happy. Until something moves through me, warmly moving out of me. And then I am all shame again. It happens. This is something I should mention. I am for some reason, all the time, bleeding. Most days I hide it from myself, and I am full of warm, wet cotton, sopping like a rotting rag doll. But I have foolish and hopeful days, searching days like today where I pray it will somehow stop. Of course it doesn’t. I flee the man, go to the bathroom. Survey the damage. Beautiful at first, the red of it surreal as it soaks cloth seams, a small moment of wonder before it dries a shameful, earthy brown. As I blot the blood that runs down my leg, I feel it surely, that I am different from all of the people outside this piss-smelling room. I am more like a surgeon, somehow. Closer to death. But not like a surgeon. This

18

blood, as it happens, is my own.

“When it started,” I say to Dr. Robert, but he stops me. “When it started doesn’t matter,” he says.

When I come out, nothing has changed, but my ears are softly humming. The man has left but my tea remains, tasting like dirt and cold. The sofa sways softly beneath me, the air is full of smells, and I am falling. I fall. Beneath the table, on the dirty floor, I am lying down. I’ve done this before, but I’m doing it now.

I bathe daily but there is nothing I can do to keep the smell of blood off of me. Dr. Robert, if he has noticed, does not let on. “You’ve got soot all over your clothes,” he says. “Like you’ve been rolling on the floor.” “I dropped something,” I say. “What did you drop?” I decide to be honest. “I don’t know,” I say. “Were you praying?” he asks. “Maybe. My knees are bruised,” I say. I suddenly think we are both thinking of me sucking dicks. My tongue tastes like bleach just to think of it. “It would be better to stay clean,” he says, but I do not respond. “Sometimes it is better to let things go. An earring, a corrective lens,” he says, though I don’t wear contacts. “Drop something, leave it be. You have to know when to let go.” “When is that?” I ask, but he will not tell me how to live. It would help, he tells me again and again, to grow thicker skin, so I always wash the dishes with gloves off, the water soaped and scalding. I know this isn’t what he means, but the other thing is either too hard or too ugly for me to contemplate. But people do not say things that offend me. They don’t speak to me at all. I get up when I can. I dust off and head home. No one minded my lying down for a while, which is strange to me and is not strange. Perhaps, with grace, we have committed to over-looking each other. Perhaps the cafe people had forgiven me in advance. “Perhaps no one is watching,” says Dr. Robert. I want to scratch his eyes out.

17

As I walk to my rented room, the day is just beginning to relent. The dusk softens my sight-lines, I feel alone in the world, and I forget I am looking for anything. Then who else could be leaning on the rail outside my building but Adam. In his grip, by the neck like a goose, he has a bottle of wine. My wrists throb at the sight of him so I hold myself and manage the right sort of face. “I’m glad,” he says, “I caught you.” And I am rushed with warmth, and shrug. And I invite him up.

“Why this one?” Dr. Robert asks. His smile like he knows better than I do. “He makes me feel,” I begin, but the doctor cuts me off. “Causes create addictions,” he says. But I felt Ad specifically. He was patient with hunger.

Upstairs we pour wine, we laugh and say little. His being here pleases me, though I can’t say why. But the air shifts as we have second glasses, something taut and vaguely violent is drawn up in between us. We are closing space, we are close. “I like,” I say, “how you never seem about to leave.” “Where would I go?” he asks. “You have whole cities in your eyes.” I am watching his mouth, I am watching the things he says come out. I am watching his hands, too. How he keeps them to himself. Mine fiddle, much less resolved. When he tells me how he once fell out of the sky, I use the excuse to touch his hair, and his fingers flinch as if to grab my wrist but don’t. But I fall over him anyway, and his warm skin warms mine as we fall together to the floor. And we kiss like laughing, and we kiss like hunger, and I forget myself like I am dreamless and asleep. Then there is another thing rising, an impossibly pleasant pain. We are in motion and moving toward something I want but cannot abide. I try to calm me. Maybe, I think. It will maybe be fine. That hard, warm body can take up mine, and I will be someone else when we finish. I take Ad’s shoulder to my teeth and bite it like a question, as I test the waters with my hands. He sighs like a child. We stop. “It’s really,” he begins and ends. “I want to. I can’t.” This before he even knows what’s going on inside me. He gives a speech. He says caution and he says care. He is touching the skin over my heart with his hand. But I am on fire with vague anger and a very specific shame.

16

“I don’t care about care,” I say. “Later I’ll care. For now,” I say. I move to take his mouth back. “No,” he says, softly pushing me down. He’s right, of course. But I won’t be seeing him again.

“He wasn’t it,” says Dr. Robert. “What you wanted, anyway.” Maybe not. Those hands, for instance. Not what I want. The ends of the fingers are clubbed and clumsy, the whole effect so much rounder than anything I’m after. I dream of a man with hands long and hard-veined, like stones shaped in a strong and endless river. Hands that seem buried in the ground.

The morning after I am guilty of sleep. I wake frantic and hit the ground running. I am looking for signs of the awful night, but the only evidence is absence. The glasses have been taken from the bedroom floor to the sink in the kitchen, little pools of water inside them to keep the wine from staining red and tannic circles inside them. So I do the dishes. The water here runs cold until unbearably the opposite; adjustment of temperature is impossible except in relation to time. This transition is so gradual that I have bright burns on both my hands before I know what’s happened. This way of things, quickly, imperceptibly, going the spectrum from one kind of bad to incredibly different worse, is an earmark of my living, is a good thing in my way of thinking. Good though it is bad because it is familiar. We reconstruct old patterns for the sake of comfort, Dr. Robert tells me, and comfort is a bed of nails before it’s a warm blanket, if that’s where you come from. It is, for me. Or more like the Iron Maiden, closing slowly, and slowly the spikes push in. It feels like coming home. Three days before I first met Dr. Robert, I stepped on a woman at the Central Public Library. I understood something then, in a wham of bright light, a dawn both brilliant and crippling. I won’t ever forget this woman, though she is a faceless smock in my memory. She told me that day, curtly, and without intention, the stupid truth of human interaction. People don’t need to know what you are, and they certainly don’t need the why of it. They just need to know what to do with you.

“What did you think he would do with you?” asks Dr. Robert.

15

“I don’t know,” I say. But this time it is a lie. A lie like always.

I know what I thought he would do. But I don’t believe what I think. When I sat in the field that library day, waiting for the doctor, I dreamed. I dreamed hard and fast that the whole world stemmed from the dirt where I sat, the traffic and the people, the woman with the poppies and the man with the eloquent arms, they all sprung from the ground right beneath me, sprung up in pods like plants. I dreamed that history was small and cause was a whim and that nothing could be broken, that it just came up new and new again. And while I could hold it, I knew it was a lie, and if I moved it would break but I wanted it firm, I wanted it like love and God and I was too sick to move so I waited. And then there were the dragonflies, out by the thousands. I could hear them flickering all around me, real and unlikely as anything. “They grow here,” I said, and I said to myself, like plants, I meant, though it wasn’t true. And none of it was mine, I knew, and it was wrong the way I saw it. But wanting is something different. Or I think so, anyway. I try to explain to the doctor. “Listen,” I say. “I lie to make it beautiful, but I’m not happy. Even when I’m pleased.”

Ad’s hands, I will tell the truth, pleased me. I got him to leave, but first he stayed, until I fell asleep. “It’s all right to say things you don’t believe,” says Dr. Robert, “so long as you remember what you’re arguing.” “Right,” I say. I line up the fingers of my right hand perfectly with the fingers of my left. Here is the church, here is the steeple. “What am I arguing?” I ask. “Efficiency,” says Dr. Robert.

14

Belt Buckled Brown Eyed Boy In Boots // eleni tountas

He sings the words to all the rants that country twang has made to dancea two step step he stomps his feet downs beers like horses eating wheata tooth pick t’ween his pearly whitestries best to know his wrongs from rightsa good ol’ boy just wants some funand that means he’ll be doing wrongespecially when he spikes her drinkwith everclear so she won’t thinkhe’s dense as lead and full of sinthe poison will make her give into everything his mind believesthe strong shit will make her conceivesome dim wit son just like himselfbut thinking he can go to hellshe takes her beer and then takes hisand when he’s gone switches the fizz

Too blind to think she’d know his rootsBelt buckled brown eyed girl in boots

13

Beelen St., Pittsburgh // dena h. saleh

Across the streetfrom the centre de le mundoin the city of the woodsunder a brindled sky we singthe drums and our hearts beatingto a song that plays eternally.The street hears our noises and replieswith everything still happening.In a house on a buzzing stripthe lantern-colored light edges out of doors.

12

Family Farm // taya kitaysky

Back then, our faces were plain as potatoes—Until the miracle came: our rooster,struck by lightning, flashed into a peacockbefore collapsing dead! Our jealousywas iridescent green and blue that night.And we began to believe that our timewould come, too. We’d turn into glisteningmermaid souls and kings, and our true glorywould brim before us in soup bowls of light.These days we float through the sacred fields:high priests and priestesses of potatoes.

11

Exposure Can Cause Serious Health Problems // nora newhouse

The Other Day, I Bent down and swept up some Tiny Lead Paint Chips and DustWith my index digit,Thinking it was cocaine I’d spilt. I Put my index digit In my mouth and sucked, then I Remembered what the broker had said about the apartment’sLead Paint. Don’t Eat The Paint Chips, he’d joked. I wonder what will happen.

10

The Way I Feel // song lyrics by ora fruchter and brandon korch

I bet you thought Kalamazoo wasn’t realBut guess whatIt’s realI’ve been there before and the people feelThat they’re realSo it’s real

And you know what’s realAnd you know what’s real

The way I feel

I bet you thought the tooth fairy wasn’t realBut guess whatMy mom doesn’t stealShe puts some quarters in my oatmeal We have a dealShe doesn’t steal

And you know what’s realAnd you know what’s real

The way I feel

I bet you thought that movies were fakeBut guess whatThey make me cryThat’s not a lieEvery slip on each banana peel Is realReel to reel

And you know what’s realAnd you know what’s real

The way I feel

I bet you thought the T-rex wasn’t realBut guess whatHe’s at the doorSaying “roar”Which in dinosaurMeans “I’m real”

And you know what’s realAnd you know what’s real

The way I feel9

Jumping Rope Is for Queers // spike schwab

I always kept my fingers crossedfor the parachute,or the scooters.Flag football sucked.Please don’t make me play four-square.When I’ll need these badminton skills in the future, I cannot imagine,but that was one hell of a serve.Kickball, softball, baseball, basketball,I guess it was always the balls that did it for me.Jump-roping competition,sign your name next to the tricks you can do.Bitch, I can flip-flop, hop-scotch, double it up, wear it down.I’ll do it, but, just so you know, this doesn’t help the rumors.No, not at all.

8

Hardcore Napper // shane mcconnell

I’m a hardcore napper flirting with the hereafterBreak into your room a belligerent bedjackerGot the grim reaper jacking off watching meTempting death with my immaculate cadaverSleep is its cousin I guess we’re all relatedPass out and leave your futon desecratedEven when it’s nice out I’m pushing for lights outOn my lunch break I’m longing for a mattressGo into my car in the parking lot Even when the sun is hot People walk by and make the joke ‘is he dead?’I’m notBut I could sure use a killswitch for consciousnessIt’s like staging my afternoon deathI put my body in a box…Keep the windows rolled so noise is blockedIt’s not to meet my maker just to meet my masterMaster…Master…Face my inner life interpret plot and package itI organize dream life with narrativeMy phone vibrates as I crash on your sofaIn my dream it’s the rattle of a robot cobraRunning through the rooms of an abandoned warehouseWith the landscape morphing there’s one way outOften times I’m tortured by the stings I imagineIt doesn’t even help that none of this happenedRepressed urges my ego demons speakI see weakness hidden deep every time I fall asleep

7

And Whitman, If You Really Want To Know Me // jeanette anderson

I am the sum of the Earth spanned with iron rails, lilac bushes, dried lilies, sleep, demanding stars, rushed leaves of grass, soft girls, raspberry fuzz, giant trees, drawing constellations on the inside of your ribs, yards, canals, letters from God, hips swinging left right left, biting clouds, colorless rooms and red waves, the crash, the making of sand, skin like warm dough, dangerous tides, ripped white flags, walking across mudflats, crushing clams, screaming electric, life preservers thrown from the air, tasting blue and violet and orange and you, cold pillows in July, climbing ladders, empty rooftops, flipping bottle caps, fields of violent ash, apple picking season, deer still devotion, atoms in love, dry docks, memories like caves, 30 percent water for eels to play, dim lit churches, a bow and an arrow, trembling men, sliding across a finished floor in purple socks, salt, banana bread, leaping from seats because there is a wild unrest that is foaming between our legs, love and faith like ships sailing West.

6

Red/White // lauren nixon

And it is the summer,which means the urgesare hoppinglike slick yellow kernelsin our bellies, flutteringlike petals. This heatis thick and sticksto my skinlike a sucked-oncherry lollipop. We are twoBlack women, tintedby that peach sphere, stainedin the juice of freshlysnipped blades of grass.

We are two Black women. Lips pressed against lipspressed against poisonutteranceslodged against us.

There’s a police car glidingin. White skin mounted sturdilyin the driver’s seat.

My dingy caris sleeping in this park,we’re sprawled across the seats– and girl don’t you knowit’s light-years past dusk.

5

Your hand is heavyon my thigh, but I’ve neverfelt lighter. Cause tonight,the chirps and the humsand the hotof your breathand my grass-smeared dressand your cocoaflesh has pressedagainst his White,suffocated his presence,and made all these hoursof defianceso very worthwhile.

4

The Roller Derby Baby // lauren elisabeth scott

It’s like this: a baby naked on the roller derby floor,cooing with the lights and the ground’s soft rumble,and we are both the baby, and we are growing tired,and we’d like to say goodnightbut our brains haven’t yet learned language,and our toes are splayed to the rushing air,and our spit is dribbling onto our chest,and here come the mothers with their striped socks and tattoos,and we wonder if they’re bringing milk,and they’re coming so quickly…

Unseen, the cannibals’ embrace. Unheard, the hum of gratitude as they gnaw each other’s arms. Unseen, the ladder from the pit.

It’s like the time we played scrabble by the riverand made love on the rock halfway through,the way the tiles shook into the water like earthwormsand sank, bringing language to the fish.Three letters clung to the moss, barnaclesor oracles, X, V, Q, all high-pointersand no good spots on the board.

Unseen, intestines tied like bed sheets. Unseen, the lasso to the sky. Unseen, the bloated bellies’ ascension, blood dripping upwards, teeth laid in a smile on the ground.

It’s these buckled legs:I am the deer’s eye, you the other. We meet only in reflection,so much meat and skull between us, so often caught in headlights.

3

2

Letter Endings // hillary schneller

Skull Molding // nicole dular

Come on home to waves of sound instead of water, breathing light and sweat glands, hair as coarse as sand. You’ll curl your eyelids onto seascapes of expectation, mollusks of plastic snake tails, sea-slugs of smelly cream. Knee deep in loss of time (or reorientation with it), the ages pass along your knuckles. It has never been so loud; you hate the drumming of pulses and respiratory gear-shifting, the cranial pullings (neuron-firing squads wait outside your gate). You will never get used to asking for what you want. Baby, baby if it wasn’t for your abnormality, you would’ve never been here. If it wasn’t that your head came in parts, there would be no rhymes of kings and eggs. You would’ve never made it. Baby, your softness calls me every night, whispers comfort along translucent fingernails as soft as skin. I come to you in hopes of osmosis: that you can be my Jesus Christ Son of God Savior of Man Born through Virgin Skin It’s a Miracle. (I pet the back of your skull with the nape of my nose.) Bone against bone, you are in pieces. Baby, I must fix you. Your calcium deposits are four giant plates, free-floating across your knowledge’s river currents I can hold them in my hand! I’m afraid the fibrous sutures just aren’t enough. There must be something better. There must be something hard to all this down, there must be something human to all this un-godly purity. Un-oxidized hands hold no fingerprints (I’ve searched!) and you only (have four hairs for eyebrows). My hands reach across your crown of fibroid feathers, skinny and starved for any kind of pollutant. Baby, I won’t let bubbles and breaks get to you. I will cradle your head in my hands, like a sculptor to molten brass. My pupil vibration will pour over every nook and cranny until I knead the (im)perfections out. Baby. Baby, there is still time! Time to palm plateaus and flatten (the canyons of your bones). Time, to smooth the scalp of original sin, to translate Homer into something more terrestrial. (We’re all a little imperfect.) And with a roll of the thumb and a pull from one scaled claw, you’ll see the difference a frame can make, and I’ll stand knee-deep in your tiny, rippled pink-softness. Don’t be afraid, baby: it is nothing more than a softening.

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The Animation (1939) // jesse littlejohn

It went up, he knows,like this:

He pencils in the Hindenburg. He turnsin his hands the burning ship and playsall the keys of the flame. Next frame: a map.The blue lines ravel and a two-track bends away.He writes, “Poland. No Season. A Train Coughs Here.”

Then all of those cities, found in an inch,rise up slow and smoke-roseand lantern-lit.

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Visiting // julie buntin

Everything they said about Seattle was true.November, and it rained, rained, rained.The pine trees, the A-frame houses,the lone swing set across the street in the elementary schoolyard;the whole suburb sagged, dark and edgeless with rainwater.

We wore wool socks and thermals to bed. Some oily fluids were getting in, coasting along the walls from the leaky attic abovewhere your family kept their Russian past.

On the ceiling, water spots meandered like planets from room to room.

The week I was there you workedall day at the bookstorea mile from the sopping house.I visited daily, read while you scanned barcodes. Sometimes I left before close to start our dinner, a pot of tea.I took the path through the woodsand felt, in the dark, alone there,a certain immense fear ballooning—

I’ve known since girlhood that a pack of slavering dogs wait in the unknown places and they are hungry, and after meand if I make a wrong noise, or misstep they’ll materialize, and turn me into one of them.

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So I pulled the umbrella down low and nearly ran. Back, at your home, I paced and watched the window.The clock struck your usual time:no door opened. No you in the rain. But I thought I saw a flash out there—a strand of drool,a watchful, blurry eye.

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Old Song // naima woods

put the bread in the basketcover it with cheesecloth cover yourself with a hatso you don’t get too dark

hide yourself in shadowswhen you’re afraid

dip one toe into the laketo see if water-snakes come

count loose quarters intostacked columns of dollars

don’t ever bite your fingernailsor dance with a boy who does

he’ll give you honeydewkiss you on your mouth

don’t let boys kiss youespecially not with melon lips

lattice top for boysenberry piegraham cracker crust for pumpkin

do not love yourself morethan you love me

do not love yourself more

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Pass Through Me For Awhile // jack ramsey

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We Men of Science // raphael bob-waksberg

My wife was eleven months pregnant at the time, which always seemed to me an awful lot of months to be pregnant. Is that normal? I would say and she would say: The doctor says it’s normal. And I would say: I don’t think it is. And she would say: Are you a doctor, Yoni? And then I would say: Yeah. I am, actually. And she would say: Can we drop it? I earned my doctorate in aerospace engineering, but my real passion was always molecular biophysics. When I took the phone call from my friend and mentor Dr. Carl Hesslein, I was in the middle of giving a lecture on the Shape of the Universe to a sparsely attended class at a generally uninspiring and forgettable university. I showed this slide:

First the good news, I said: We’re doomed. Our planet is dying. Our universe is dying. Our friends, our family, everyone we’ve ever known, everyone we ever will know, all our distant progeny who are thousands of generations away from even being born, all of us, are slowly slowly dying dying dying.

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I showed this slide:

And then I said: Oh, I’m sorry, did I say GOOD news? At this point, my lecture notes instructed me to: [PAUSE FOR LAUGHTER.] Nobody laughed. I paused anyway. But there is good news, I continued. And that is this: My cell phone rang. I knew immediately it was Dr. Hesslein because of the ringtone, Beethoven’s lush and haunting Vienna On My Mind. Carl spoke quickly in overlapping fragments: Yoni! The Grant! The Board! Under the Direction of! Was Established! It’s happening! I Can’t Even! It’s Happening! The It that was Happening was the Anti-Door, a project he and I both had spent the majority of our adult lives daydreaming about, which was all of a sudden becoming a reality thanks to a generous grant from the Fielding Corporation. I first became interested in Carl’s research eight years earlier, after I witnessed Something Terrible on the subway. I don’t want to make a novel out of it, but here’s what happened: I was reading Walt Hastings’s new book. It was a meditation on particle velocity levels—nothing revolutionary. Suddenly, very loudly, I heard that Something Terrible was happening. No! Please don’t! I didn’t look up. Help, I heard. And then, just in case I hadn’t heard: Please help me. Please!

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I focused on the words in my book. I read the same paragraph over and over again. This is what it said: Now, you probably don’t need a book to tell you that snails are quiet, but guess what: Snails Are Quiet. (Unless you step on them.) Also, Debra, I love you, will you marry me? For dinner, Jessica and I had Chinese. I said: How was your day? And she said: Fucking fruit flies… And I said: Yeah… She said: How was your day? And I said: Walt Hastings asked Debra to marry him. And she said: That’s nice. And then: Who’s Debra? And I said: I don’t know. That night, I lay in bed and stared at the stars (we were remodeling at the time and our bedroom had no roof) and I wondered how a better version of me might have acted less cowardly. In the following years I often pondered this un-me, an un-me who was gracious to my wife when I was callous and patient with my students when I was irritable. Dr. Hesslein had written in detail about an anti-universe which counter-resembles our own, balancing us, neutralizing us, receiving our excess energy and converting it to anti-energy. The braver, wiser, better un-me would live there, as would the uns of everybody who ever existed. Everything the anti-universe is would fit neatly into the crevices of everything we are not, like two halves of an English muffin. It would have the solutions to our problems and it would inspire us to become a better un-them. Having finally raised the capital, Dr. Hesslein was now assembling a team of physicists and engineers, big marquee names like James Kay, Nadia Farber, and Mickey Kramer. He asked if I wanted to be a part of history. I didn’t have to think about it.

Work began on the Anti-Door that fall, under the assumption that while we were constructing a door that opens in, scientists in the op-

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posite universe would be building a corresponding door that opens out. Of course, the world is not black and white, and opposites turned out to be a little more fluid than we anticipated. Our initial equations did not consider the existence of multiple anti-universes. The opposite of a dog can be a cat, or a different dog, or nothing at all, The Absence of Dog. I should iterate that this is an over-simplification of the math, but it is emblematic of the basic principle. Here is another example:

Ex: Possible opposites

I don’t say I love you. I [say] I love you. I don’t say [I hate you]. [You] don’t say [you love me]. I don’t say I love you. [I don’t even think it.]

(Note that in three out of four cases, the opposite of silence is silence.)

We had announced with great fanfare a new era of balance and understanding, but the more tests we ran, the more it became apparent that each anti-universe would be as heavy with war and famine as our own. As we surveyed the many possibilities, we found frequently, maddeningly, unforgivably, the opposite of silence was silence. The board threatened to cut funding, but Dr. Hesslein fought passionately. If we don’t go in there, they’re going to come out here, and we’re all going to look like assholes, he said, and it was difficult to argue with that kind of logic. Each of us was assigned an anti-universe to explore and write a brief report on. I mean it, Dr. Hesslein said: Brief. If it’s more than ten pages, I’m not going to read it. I entered the Anti-Door and immediately stumbled into a pool of water. I fell on all fours and spat up blood; I had swallowed a tooth. I squinted as my eyes adjusted to the new light. As far as I could tell, it was the same lab I had just come from, but with six inches of water in it. An incredibly handsome man in a lab coat was staring at me, paralyzed with fear. I said: You’re Yonatan Beckerman. And he said: Don’t hurt me! I’m really good at basketball! I said: You’re the opposite of me. And he said: No, you’re the opposite of me. And I said: Yes, both those things are true. And he said: No, neither of those things are true. And I thought: Jesus, this guy’s an asshole. And he said: Hey, I don’t know what your deal is, but you want to come over for dinner? You can meet my wife. She’s a total babe. We walked to his house. The streets were flooded and the other

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Yonatan made fun of me for not wearing boots. Everywhere, people were shouting and dropping large electronic appliances out of win-dows. Terrifying bats fluttered from lamppost to lamppost. Yonatan lived in a water-damaged mansion in the middle of a river. He kicked down the front door and shouted into the kitchen: Jecka, I found some guy! He wants dinner. And I said: My name is Yoni; I work at the lab with your husband. The first thing I noticed about Jecka Beckerman was how very not pregnant she was. She wiped her hand on her apron and smiled as she shook my hand. It’s so nice to see you, she said. Dinner will be ready in a minute. It was the best meal I’d had in years. Jecka told us about the research she’d been doing on four-winged hummingbirds. Technically, they’re not really birds, she said. We don’t know what they are. But check out these migratory patterns… I could barely follow her, she talked so quickly. She flitted wildly between ideas and knocked over several glasses of wine. If the field test doesn’t work, I’ll die. I will actually literally fall over dead and stay dead for the rest of my life. But if it does work, oh Yoni, if it does work, it’s too good to say out loud, too good even to think about… The first thing I did when I got home was I kissed Jessica on the mouth and I said: Let’s do something about this kid, huh? We went to the hospital and I said: Hey, excuse me, we have a real problem here. My wife has been pregnant for over a year and a half. The doctor said: Are you sure? Maybe you just lost count. And Jessica said: We didn’t lose count. And I said: Can’t we induce labor? And he said: No, that’s gross, I don’t like doing it. Just wait it out. I’m sure it’ll be any day now. And I said: That’s your advice? And he said: Well, it can’t be much longer, can it? And my wife said: Let it go, Yoni. On the ride home, I said: Tell me something interesting about fruit flies. Jessica looked at me and said: Yoni. They’re fucking fruit flies. I commuted through the Anti-Door daily for the next several weeks, each time spitting out a new tooth and shoving it into my pocket so Jecka could sew it back into my mouth later. I became an expert at navigating my way through their neighborhood and would try to beat my time from the lab to their house. Five minutes. Two minutes. Jecka and I sat together at one of Yonatan’s basketball games. I leaned close to her and whispered: He’s really very good. Jecka smiled. Isn’t he? I was going to make cupcakes, but I didn’t have the energy. I said: That’s okay; I can never eat cupcakes without feeling

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guilty. And she said: Yonatan’s the same way, and I knew that one of us was lying. I asked her about her field test. Her eyes sank and then flickered and she asked me what I was doing for New Year’s. Yonaton has to work. Why don’t you come over? I don’t want to be alone. When I told Jessica I had to work over New Year’s, she took it harder than I expected. Don’t make me go to that party by myself, she said, and I said: You’ll be fine. She said: But I’m baking a pie. I never bake! I said: Save me a slice. We sat in the living room, drinking wine and listening to the radio because Jecka had thrown her TV out the window. There was a war in some country that I was pretty sure didn’t exist in my universe. Jecka looked at me and frowned and I could tell she wanted to ask me something so I said: What? And she said: When you walk through the Anti-Door, does it make you happier? I’m always happy to see you, I said. And she said: Yeah, but I was thinking… Say I’m at one third hap-piness capacity. When I walk through the door, do I all of a sudden become two thirds happy? I guess so, I said. Double your happiness! And she said: But that’s the problem; I don’t know how happy I am. For all I know I could be at seventy-five percent happiness, and once I go through the door I get knocked down to twenty-five. I don’t know what would be sadder; that I would now be a third as happy as I was before, or the realization that what I was before—that is to say, what I am now—is three quarters as happy as I could possibly get. What if I were zero happy, and I walked through the door to find that a hundred happy still isn’t all that happy? What then? And I started to say: That’s not actually— but she was really worked up and then all of a sudden it was almost midnight and I said: Happy— and the second hand on my watch quivered and all of a sudden it was midnight and all of a sudden we were kissing and the people on the radio were cheering and I opened my eyes while I kissed her and I saw a four-winged butterfly at the window and everything was too too beautiful. When I re-entered my own universe, the lab was flooded; I must have left the door open. I crawled into bed and Jessica was half-awake and she whispered: Hey. And I said: Hey there. She pointed to her cheek and I kissed her and asked: How was the party? And she said: I wish you’d been there.

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And I said: I’m sorry. She said: I can’t talk to people. I have too many teeth in my mouth; all the words come out wrong. I keep growing new teeth—it’s really weird. Do you think it could be a side effect of the pregnancy? And I said: I don’t know. We lay in bed and looked at the stars (the bed was outside because we were fumigating the house at the time) and Jessica said: I missed you. And she rested her head on my chest, and I said: Have you ever wondered what it’s like to go through the Anti-Door? And she mumbled: Sometimes. And she fell asleep. My cell phone woke us up early and Jessica shouted: Turn that fucking thing off! It was Nadia Farber and the ringtone was Mahler’s up-tempo march My Baby Takes the Morning Ludwigsbahn. She said: Mickey Kramer… he’s dead. And I said: Oh my God, is he okay? And she said: Yeah, well, he’s dead, so… no. Scientists were dropping all over. Another one had killed herself by making sure there were no chainsaws in the lab, and then leaping headfirst through the Anti-Door into a room full of chainsaws.

Dr. Hesslein called me into his office: I wouldn’t be lying if I didn’t say I wasn’t concerned. He doodled in his legal pad. We thought we could travel back and forth between universes, like a beam of light bouncing repeatedly between two parallel mirrors. But instead we fall through them like a light hitting two mirrors diagonally, skipping across them infinitely. You understand? We don’t come back to the same place we came from! He was really upset. I pulled a book off the shelf. It was Walt Hastings’s The Science of Why Sometimes We Get Sad For No Reason. I turned to a random page: Debra, I love you, but I think I need to be alone for a little bit. Things with Jecka got more complicated. We loved each other, I knew, but the more I visited her, the more trouble we had com-municating. She was depressed. She hated her husband. I would try to tell her: Things will get better, but it came out as: Nothing didn’t get worse. One day, over take-out, she told me she was pregnant. All I could say was WOW, which is MOM upside-down.

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I crossed the street and crawled back through the Anti-Door; two large men were boarding it up. Dr. Hesslein shouted: Yoni! Everything was always a mistake! You are so wonderfully unapolo-getic! Can you never not unforgive me? I spat out a tooth. My house was so far away and it rained the whole way back. Jessica was in the living room, glaring, horrified, at our newborn baby son. I said: He’s beautiful. She didn’t say anything, so I said again: He’s beautiful. She said: I can’t stop cooking. I don’t know why. I can’t stop cook-ing food and I can’t close my mouth because of all my teeth and I don’t know what’s happening to me and I don’t know what’s happening to us and I’ve never been more scared. I wanted to say: Everything’s going to be okay, but instead what I said was nothing. She said: You’re cheating on me. And I didn’t say anything. And she said: That was a question. Are you cheating on me? And I didn’t say anything. And she said: If you’re cheating on me, don’t say any-thing. And I didn’t say anything. I almost left, she said. I almost took the baby and left, but I love you too much. And I said: You almost left? And she said: Yeah, but I didn’t. I ran for what felt like hours through the water-logged streets, racing past overturned cars and disgusting birds and billboards advertising Walt Hastings’s new book Debra, I’m Sorry, Please Take Me Back. I forced the boards off the Anti-Door and opened it directly into the Beckermans’ kitchen, where Yonatan was drinking milk and rum and staring at the wall. What happened? I said, and he held up a note that read: I almost stayed. But I didn’t. I sat next to him and neither of us said anything for a while. Then he said: Do you want to play some basketball? We played a few games. He beat me, of course, but not by a lot. I stole the ball a few times, and surprised myself by completing a lay-up. At one point I got really lucky and scored a three-pointer while he was crying. A month later, I was giving my lecture on the Shape of the Universe. But there is good news, I said. And that is this: Science will live on after we’re all dead. Science will survive with or without our attempts to understand it; Science doesn’t care. Like a callous ex-lover, Science won’t miss you, and sure, maybe that’s a little scary, but isn’t it also exciting?

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The Myriad Scales of Frederic Bourdin // bradford nicholson

Infinite orphan,Chameleon of Nantes,the mask will alwaysfit the faceless.

For years he turned thirteen:new conjugations,of new names, in new countries.

Flipped over new leaveslike Three Card Monty.He had moneyon empathy, red.

Proved a jockey in margarinefor the local police.Free to wait to be scrapedfrom the pavement.

Balding in baseball cap,thirty odd Frenchman,disguised behind Legosand Pokemon cards.

He danced like Michaelon hot Vaseline,at the talent showhe was Francisco.

Chewed charity,moved it around in his mouth,squirming into the skin of the missing.

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He was the childin piles, alone in the rainconjuring tears for a witness.

Climbed up innocence,shifting shapes on the roof‘such a poor thingeven walks like a victim.’

He’s after chicken soupand gingeralebut likes when you rubbehind his ears.

The little clay manstill working his dramas,casing our penchantfor kindness.

Way off Broadway,Frederic Bourdin,is getting a feelfor your son.

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Regarding What My Mother Spilt // amelia jackie

My mother has a habit of being late for everything.1 The morning I missed breakfast my mother put milk in a tupperware without telling me. I got off the bus and a teacher chased me down because my backpack was leaking milk everywhere and all the kids were watching. And how could my mother have been so foolish to not snap the lid tight enough, to not tell me she put the milk in my bag, to be so late for everything always and make me miss breakfast. Where I may have written ‘I hate you’ or ‘you ruined my life’ I sometimes leave blank spaces. I just lift the idea right off the page. You can draw a circle around the silence or skip past it if you need the reprieve like I do. It is a political decision to revere what my mother spilt instead of hate her for it.2

: I want to have an affair with you, this is the only reason I write.: What I look for in an interlocutor is someone who will give me a slice of her apple. When I come to Barrie’s office she gives me a paper cup to share her water. She lets me borrow her pen, and I have helped myself to her chocolate. All this set-up is to prepare me to spill. I try to tell her my project before I understand it, and she sorts through the

1 Simone De Beauvoir has an interesting discussion of lateness in The Second Sex. Men have acted as though women are late because they are absent-minded. Beauvoir says that women have been late deliberately with sober minds, as an act of protest to man’s schedule and dominance of her life.2 Drucilla Cornell. Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity, 2005. This book was a revelation to my project. Cornell wants to find a way to write her mother’s autobiography with ‘dignity.’ This is where I take the idea of loving my mother as a political stance. Cornell thinks there have been enough books about hating your mother, and she wants to search for a new representation that includes ‘intergeneration conversations.’ I was also informed by Sarah Murphy’s discussion of Cornell’s work “Mourning and Metonymy: Bearing Witness Between Women and Generations,” in Hypathia vol. 19, no. 4 (Fall 2004). Murphy discusses the need for women’s autobiography and the ethics of representation and questions the history of literarily ‘murdering the mother,’ as a way of individuation. She advocates the eternal mourning of the mother, which may be seen as an antithesis to Freud’s analysis. (Read in Dr.Karp’s course, “Mothers, Daughters, Sisters.”)

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wreckage.3

My interlocutor was once Sabrina. Last summer when her mind was moving so fast she didn’t know where to put her excess, she drank so much water it killed her. There was too much liquid for her cells to hold, her body spilled out of the world. I write for her, my life a quest to know the silt on her window. A quest to know my grandmothers dreams, thoughts she told through a slow tick of her hands.4

: It started with a lover who didn’t want to kiss me and all at once slime was everywhere. And the worst part was it felt like it was all mine and it was always oozing out of me. (I am made of slime and only I am. I keep ending up on your doorstep. Drooling on your doorstep, and there is all this crying and spitting laughter when I’m talking. All this tripping and falling on the sidewalk. Why do I keep ending up on your doorstep in the middle of night telling you things that I don’t even understand until after I say them. How can I live being made of all this slime?) And then there was Sartre whispering in my ear: “I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me. It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking, it lives obscurely under my fingers, and I sense it like a dizziness; it draws me

3 “An authoritative interlocutor is necessary if one wants to articulate one’s life according to the project of freedom and thus make sense of one’s being a woman. (Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective 31).” As quoted by Linda M. G. Zerilli in “Refiguring Rights through the Political Practice of Sexual Difference.” Zerilli discusses the collective’s task of freedom-as-world-building as opposed to sovereignty. Despite their will, women can’t be free if the world doesn’t allow it. (Read in Dr. Karp’s course “Feminist Critiques of Reason.”)4 I am indebted to Drucilla Cornell’s concept of ‘re-encircling feminine metaphors’ throughout my project. Dr. Karp teaches the text “Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law,” in her course “This Body Remembering.” Cornell wants to discover the feminine imaginary or to‘write the lack’. She discusses the historical presence of women through ‘traces’ or moments when women can be seen in literature—for example, the hysteric. The hysteric is a metaphor that can be re-envisioned by feminists, as a place of women’s subjectivity. Her sublimation was impossible within her environment, and yet we see she existed. Or to speak in terms of the project, she spilled outside of her container.

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to it as the bottom of a precipice might draw me.5” (Bodies should be enclosed. What’s-inside-is-secret-or-doesn’t-exist-but-what-if-I-can’t-stop-thinking-about-my-blood-and-organs-and-how-I’m-not-just-flesh-I-am-also-liquid and in order for you to love me I need saran wrap or at least you should hold an umbrella.) How am I supposed to imagine myself as a subject when I am wor-ried about oozing all over the room. Sekou is telling me to remove the ‘she’s.’ The ‘I’ is Amelia even if it’s not, he says. Your ‘I’ pronoun is what makes the poem powerful. You have no allegiance to the facts, he said. And then I saw it in the girl in my Friday lecture that couldn’t help sighing and lifting the hair off the back of her neck. Her black hair wet with sweat. Her lifting, letting go, lifting, sighing. Barrie asked me if I’d ever said something to someone before thinking and right as the last words left my mouth, did there ever come a river repulsion—a rain of guilt. That’s the spill. I am writing because I want you to spill with me.6

: It’s a habit of my mother, always asking me to get her a glass of water when I wake her from sleeping. My mother is a very talented sleeper.7 I know to let the faucet run and add ice but she tells me every time and that is what annoys me—the reminder. The getting of the water I like, it’s a privilege. It is a habit my grandmother has with her hands. When I scan the channels on the T.V. with a remote controller my grandmother yells: ‘quit mashing buttons’ and I know that word ‘mash’ has a funny way of working there but now it seems an appropriate word to describe what

5 Jean Paul Sartre. Being & Nothingness, 1943. Dr. Karp’s course “Feminist Critiques of Reason” discussed masculinism in philosophy and misogyny on a psychoanalytic level. We discussed Luce Irigaray’s essay “This Sex Which is Not One,” which serves as a central text to my writing and thinking. I think Karp’s intention for teaching Irigagay is to incite creativity in young feminists. The text imagines a space outside of patriarchy and seeks to design a feminist aesthetic that establishes woman as simply, present. A misinterpretation of Irigaray is that she wants to create a full presence or a determined feminine identity. The reason a young feminist might be liberated by Irigaray is because she writes as a woman. She therefore opens the possibility of other women to write as women—and to create a multitude of multiplicative identities.6 Anne Carson. “Foam (essay with rhapsody),” from Decreation, 2005.7 Anne Carson. “An Ode to Sleep,” from Decreation, 2005.

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my grandma does with her hands. She’s always moving them from her skin, to her clothes, to the table, to her toothpick (she’s chewing during our game of gin rummy). She’s always evening out whatever is around, smoothing the fabric of her linen. (Truth is she doesn’t wear linen, its polyester-blend.) Pinching at her skin, tapping no particular rhythm. She’s always involving herself with the way of things so subtly (from her skin, to her clothes, to the table, to her toothpick.) It’s a habit of my mother to talk so slowly it sounds like she’s holding honey in her mouth. It’s not just a southern habit it’s a habit of southern women—to build their houses out of molasses. And why do people think molasses is sweet? It’s not. It’s dark and barely bitter but not sugary, the taste so deep, for most unbearable. For some the darkest thickest grade is the perfect bass note to a light biscuit. For some molasses is the ideal. My mother’s slowness, her sensual intellect, never made her favored in the north. That suited her girls because we were running from the men who she over-indulged, men who could never stop loving her. I am searching for an aesthetic that doesn’t privilege lightness over weight—the grace to the obscene8. It is a habit of my grandmother to chew at the side of her mouth. To chew on the gristle long after the meat is gone. To eat little bites of the biscuit dough she is kneading.: This is the excess of identities I search for in my life. It is where my lovers reside. It is the way we make people feel when they don’t know how to identify us, when they are repulsed because our names slip from their hands like fish back to the ocean.9 We are not afraid of the slow suction of molasses. We are so alive we have foam around our mouths.

8 Jean Paul Sartre. Being & Nothingness, 1943.9 Elizabeth Grosz. “The Hetero and The Homo,” from Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought. By Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, Margaret Whitford1994. Grosz. (Studied in DR. Karp’s FCR.)Grosz takes the concept ‘reserve’ or ‘interval’ to discuss the areas of slippage where women can create their identities. She says that the death of god in post-modernism has allow for a new opening—a ‘remainder’ as opposed to a ‘lack.’ I find this especially interesting because for the most part, my project was written in the margins of my notes taken during my courses at Lang—classes in philosophy and political theory have lead me to creative language. My work is of the excess, the margins. I am researching a feminist aesthetic.

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Siphon // emily skillings

“I”, she thought“would like to stay on a long, sterile bedand run a straw from my mouth to the floor.

A trough would be filleddaily with poured fruitsthe straw would suck the fruits up into my mouth and I would be nourished.”

Ever since the small shift from baby tochild had occurredperhaps at age threeshe had occupied herself with the attractiveness of passive nourishment. Intravenous, water-bottles hanging from the ceiling rags dipped in milk and wrung into the mouthor placed between cushions at lip-level.

Even now, she had ways of trickingothers into feeding her, asking for a bite and opening her mouthwith a false-playfulness. She longed for applesaucepuddingthe food of the helpless.But she took what she gotwhich was oftenshrimp, truffles, fancy chicken-salad,or most distasteful, something which requiredexpert chewing.

At night, devising a feeding apparatus with long glossy tubes and weighty slings, sherecalled a birthday party at which, aged nine, she had fallen in love with a garden hose.

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Looking at the green chord, she had imagined that when the first drop came, it would be as if some primeval river had re-assembled itself out of subterranean poolssurfaced in her honor and devoted its first expression to the pleasure of her tongue.

Lying comfortably behind the house in a patch of rich moss, she had held it steadily above her mouth and waited.

Somewhere nearby, a knife cut deep into a chocolate cake, and many children fed themselves.

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Wood Crimes // emily skillings

When a boat hits a dock hard it’s wood being mean to wood.Same thing when a tree falls on another tree but this seems like a lesser crime.

When the splinters enter your lungs it’s hard too, when you breathewoods, running though them with only little rubber sandals. The pine is so sharp in your mouth when you sayits name. It is the name of your state, the name of the MaritimeMuseum’s oldest board.

I have not seen a nice piece of furniture here. No cherry or rosewood— something with a soft sheen, the color of rubbing hands. It is all so heavy, dark,finished with the oilof the side of the face, fish oillacquered, with strange dark marks for things to live in.

The place under the dock has the coldest, darkest water. Its belly is meanand eats kids like us alive.