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OTHER ESSAY PAGES: Essays 2020-2021, Essays 2024-2025

TO SUBMIT, SEARCH SUBMITTABLE'S DISCOVER TAB ON SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: SOFLOPOJO ESSAY

November 2023:

​Randy Goggin
&
Jason M. Thornberry 

Randy Goggin

Finding Black Sea Hares on the Beach with My Daughter

               Its black, spineless form lay discarded on the storm-tattered shore – a mess of Sargassum, sea grass, and sponges. I studied its tacky, gastropod flesh, almost rubber-like in the early morning sun. It was dead, but I still wanted Livia to see it, to have a glimpse at the life inhabiting these gulf waters.
               Come look at this, Liv, I called out above the wind.
               She approached in her black pants, Nirvana t-shirt, and Doc Martins.
               You know what this is?
               She shook her head no.
               It’s a sea hare. It washed up last night in the storm. I pointed out the sensory structures on each side of its head, explaining how they were said to resemble rabbit’s ears. When I told her that’s how they got their name, she just nodded. It’s a marine snail, I added to keep her engaged. But they don’t have external shells like other snails do.
               Why did it die? she asked me, cracking each pale, chalkboard knuckle.
               They’re made for water, not for open air.
               She nodded, kicking at the sand with her boots – her laces loose; it was driving me crazy.
               I resisted lecturing her on what a poor choice it was to wear combat boots on a barrier island, while simultaneously appreciating the fact she had her own style and was sticking to it - presenting her individuality to the world.
               So, they dry out? she asked.
               They dry out and can’t breathe.
               Why can’t they breathe?
               They’ve got gills, not lungs like us.
               Liv brushed her dyed black hair away from her eyes. She was thinking, taking in the details of the sea hare’s death. How much of the information I shared with her would stick? I turned away, setting off at a slow pace up the beach. She followed, keeping back at a comfortable distance. I scanned the multitude of objects on the barrier island shore, all the garbage and lifeforms expelled from the sea. Many of the people we passed looked confused and unsettled, like shipwreck survivors searching through the wreckage for supplies.
               We walked closer down to where the breakers were rolling, the sharp bend in the island’s shore up ahead. Florida’s barrier islands were shaped by waves and strong currents, their boundaries continuously reshaped and ever shifting over time. Liv followed, lost in her own private thoughts - her own waves rolling as she too changed through the years; one day she’d be transformed into a woman.
               I pointed back across Hurricane Pass: This island was once part of Caladesi. A hurricane cut this side off from the other.
               That’s cool, she said, and I couldn’t tell if she meant it.
               I took the hint of her silence and didn’t offer any more.
               Liv studied the lifeforms strewn across the shore, kicking shells and other objects she deemed worthy of interest. She picked up an empty pen shell, examining the iridescent surface inside. She tossed it away when a juvenile crab came crawling out.
               I laughed, but she only gave me a look.
               Liv was changing, the world beating relentlessly against her shores, her developing 13-year old body and mind with their own unique internal forces. There had been so much reshaping over the last three years. Sometimes I questioned whether I was falling short as a father. Liv’s struggles reshaped me too.
               There’s a lot of garbage out here, she said as we walked.
               It’s everywhere. All through the oceans.
               It sucks.
               It does. It sucks pretty bad.
               People suck, she said, and I let out a laugh.
               I catalogued the different types of garbage we saw: plastics, rubber, food wrappers, straws. There was Styrofoam, fishing line, and mass-manufactured toys. Broken-loose buoys and pool noodles had washed up into the dunes. I stopped myself, focusing on the beauty instead, on the multitude of marine forms, their different colors, shapes, and sizes: lightning whelks, tulip snails, hermit crabs, fiddlers. Shore birds were foraging through piles of wrack: Wilson’s plovers, willets, sanderlings, snowies. There were terns, egrets, and laughing gulls too. A ruddy turnstone flipped over shells, mangrove leaves, a rusted bottle cap - flying off when a young couple holding hands crossed its path.
               I spotted another blob of sea hare just up ahead, a discoloration down closer to the water. I adjusted our course so that we’d stumble across it. If we were lucky, maybe Liv would get to see one alive. The wind whistled in our ears, and Liv’s combat boots crunched, the calcified architectures of shells breaking beneath the weight of our bodies. As we walked, we watched the waves and the garbage on shore. The sea hare was off to the left. I adjusted again.
               Another sea hare, Liv announced, quickly closing the distance; there was excitement in her eyes at having been the one to find it. It looks alive. Dad, I think it’s still breathing! Look, it’s lying in a puddle of water!
               And it was alive, its skin glossy and smooth, its parapodia gently flapping at its sides.
               It’s moving, Liv said. It’s flapping its wings!
               I grabbed two clumps of Sargassum from an adjacent wrack pile. Liv watched as I used the makeshift gloves to scoop up the sea hare. I walked it down the steep shore and out into the gulf, being careful not to step hard on rogue limestone rocks.
               The debris was a legacy of private developers in the 60’s. In an attempt to expand available real estate on the front beach of the island, they had tons of dredged rocks and sand dumped onto the shore. But their lack of knowledge in barrier island physics came with a price. When the first big storm hit, the sand washed away – leaving hundreds of tons of exposed limestone rubble in its place. After going bankrupt the developers sold to the state. Now the main beach was forever marred by their efforts.
               I braced myself against an incoming wave, holding the sea hare up over my head. When the water flattened out, I tossed it out further. It disappeared below the turbid water and chop. I thought of Liv now having to hop back and forth between houses, of all the dark things in the world she’d soon face, of how much she’d changed in a year - the thoughts beating at my edges with erosional force. I pushed them down, the sea changing its shape in each moment. I thought of the sea hare swimming somewhere down on the bottom.
               Despite the garbage, I was grateful for what was left of Florida’s coastal ecosystems. And Liv was with me, despite her many protestations. When I turned back, she’d moved off down the beach. She was down on one knee examining something in the sand. I climbed the steep slope of barrier island shore, walking her way but holding back to give her space. Two girls in bikinis were passing Liv by - seventeen or eighteen years old at most. They were laughing, both looking over at Liv. I waited to see if they’d say something rude. They laughed again still looking her way. Then one of them screamed when something touched her foot - my blood pressure dropping as they made their way past.
               My daughter’s focus remained unbroken on whatever creature she found, maybe a sea horse, sea star, or sand dollar. She was poking again with one gentle finger. I waited, hoping she’d call me over to look. Then she picked the creature up in both hands and stood up. Now I could see it, another sea hare washed up. Without hesitation she stomped straight out into the water, her combat boots submerged in the gulf.  She waded deeper, the water up to her knees. I saw the convergence then of the child and woman she’d become – caught in a precarious balance in time. With the concentration of a healer, or tightrope walker, she heaved the sea hare out into gray, churning waters.
 

Randy Goggin lives on the gulf coast of central Florida, where he works as a park ranger on a county-managed nature preserve in north Pinellas County. His prose has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Sandhill Review, The Dillydoun Review, and the Tampa Bay Times. If he had a superpower, it would involve the ability to give everyone a decent place to live and some extra cash for vacations.dit.

Jason M. Thornberry ​

“Press Eject”
 
Real skinheads prefer reggae over punk rock. But not the skinheads that showed up to my second concert: these were the unembarrassed white supremacists, the chair-throwing clowns on television, the sweaty bullies joining other sweaty bullies singling out meek loners to abuse. Nazi skinheads played an outsized role in the punk community I belonged to in the late 1980s and early 1990s—and the ones who attended my second concert couldn’t care less about music. Their mission was violence. 
               My second concert was in Brian Baxter’s mother’s garage, with my drums parked a few inches north of an oil stain from the family car. I’d recently been disinvited from Lunacy and was eager to find something new. My former bandmates had solid reasons for dropping me. Two leap to mind: I was a terrible drummer, and my wobbly second-hand set was held together by old shoelaces and duct tape. But also, and most importantly, I wasn’t a metalhead. I didn’t look ready for MTV. But none of that mattered in the world of punk, where being amateurish, sloppy, and unpretentious were attributes.
               Brian’s garage was a hallowed place where I’d experienced punk firsthand. Up close. Inches away. Brian’s monthly gigs were legendary—at least in the North End of San Bernardino. He was the leader of North End Hard Core (or NEHC), a crafty trio blending paroxysms of noise with almost lighthearted improvisation—what I could’ve imagined the Bad Brains sounding like if the Grateful Dead influenced them. Ron swatted the drums like a shirtless tennis champ; Jason, a baseball cap-wearing, mustachioed teenager, winced during his fitful guitar solos; and the short, stocky, bleached blonde fireplug Brian played distorted bass guitar with his strings upside down, with echo effects on his gravelly vocals.
               Brian wanted to throw another band together randomly from a few names and numbers on a sheet of paper. But he wouldn’t be in it; he’d be the band’s advisor, almost a manager, and add them to the monthly shows in his mom’s garage.
               “Was I interested?” he asked. 
               I hung up, heaved my drums into my father’s pickup, and raced between green lights to Brian’s. I sat on his mother’s couch, awaiting the other musicians.  
               Brian and I watched camcordered concert videos. Out of focus, forty-five-degree angles in his people-packed garage. Shadowy faces lit by a shaky lightbulb hanging in the center of the room above a pile of amplifiers. The accelerating motorized blade of a fuzzy electric guitar. A bass guitar’s bottomless vibration. A snare drum’s piercing sizzle. Like blowing on a spiderweb, the faulty bulb trembled as the music rose and fell, occasionally blanketing the audience in shadow. They shouted to NEHC to play their one recognizable tune, a song about the current president’s ancestry. Brian appeased them: “I wonder if Reagan is related to Hitler,” he sang, “cuz if he is, we’ll surely die!” His vocals hiccupped from the speakers, reverberating in that sultry room as bodies swirled in a slam-dancing tide, kicking over laundry baskets, bicycles, and camping supplies, smashing and falling against the garage door, the washing machine and a workbench, shouting, gasping, pressing, lurching, in thrall to the music.
               NEHC’s concerts epitomized punk for me: danger, tension, excitement, and disregard for music’s rules. Endless possibility. Brian pressed EJECT, and the VCR burped out a well-worn cartridge as his mother walked in with a grocery bag. Mrs. Baxter saw me as another of her teenage son’s wastrel teenage friends, and she began a sermon on the virtues of living responsibly. Brian was unfazed: the sermon was standard procedure for newcomers. I didn’t know anyone who’d let their garage become a monthly concert venue, and I admired his mother immediately.
               Then came a knock. First in the door was Adrian. Adrian was a scrawny fifteen-year-old with an unbuttoned flannel over a concert T-shirt, his mousy hair growing out from a Mohawk. Next was John. John looked like me: an anonymous brown-haired kid in a T-shirt and jeans. Behind John was his brother, Spanky. Spanky wore a bowler hat and shiny combat boots that stopped at his kneecaps. He could have been auditioning for the remake of A Clockwork Orange.
               Brian began the introductions: “Jason plays drums. He used to be in Lunacy.” 
               “At least he doesn’t have long hair,” said Spanky.
               We set up our gear in the garage and Brian loaned me a rug to stop my bass drum from shimmying across the concrete. Spanky plugged a shiny black guitar into his practice amp. He turned on the amp, and his guitar became a burglar alarm, screaming and feeding back, stabbing our ears whenever he wasn’t touching the strings. John stood beside my drums, calmly plucking the E string of his black bass while we warmed up. Adrian didn’t bring any equipment. Brian handed him a microphone.
               When John suggested “Stepping Stone,” a Monkees song covered by the Sex Pistols, I counted us off, plonking away at a generic meat and potatoes drumbeat (1-2, 1-2). Spanky wrenched what he could out of a single power chord, and John followed us note for note into the pit of Tartarus. Thumbing the microphone’s ON button, Adrian howled, “I-I-I-I-I’m not your stepping stone,” in a migraine falsetto. Fingernails across a sixty-foot blackboard were Mozart by comparison, and the recording of a prolonged, subhuman fart would’ve beaten us to a Grammy Award.
               We played the song several times, each successive attempt sounding worse before Brian pressed EJECT on a nearby boombox and left. In his bedroom, he cut an arbitrary logo from a magazine, Scotch-taping it to a cassette cover. He jogged back to the garage, smiling.
               “Here’s your new demo,” he said.
               The cassette read: White Dwarf. 
               Brian wondered if White Dwarf wanted to open for NEHC next week. Taking our silence as a yes, he called his drummer to add us to the flyer he was making. 
               Adrian caught a ride home. As soon as he was gone, Brian declared the kid couldn’t sing. It didn’t matter that none of us could play the same thing twice, I knew a single beat, and Spanky’s shrieking guitar was impossibly out of tune. Our vocalist was the problem. Brian waited until he figured the boy was home, picked up the phone, and told Adrian we were firing him. Already, White Dwarf had been diminished by one—and I should have taken the cue to eject myself because, within moments, Henry, John and Spanky’s skinhead cousin, knocked at the door. After another round of spirited disorder, organized to coincide with Henry’s German Shepherd vocal style, I went home. 
               I told my father I joined a new band. “But I’m already over it.” He thought I should keep looking if it didn’t feel right. Dad said I’d know when I’d found the right people. That night, I kept reaching for the telephone in the kitchen, wanting to call Brian. 
               Before I got a chance to quit, John honked his horn outside my father’s house. It had already been a week. I sat in the back of John’s pickup, squeezing between speaker cabinets, guitars, my drums, and Henry’s scowling skinhead friends. The band’s name had been changed to Prejustice—whatever that meant—and we returned to Brian’s for our debut. 
               Prejustice played with Lunacy and NEHC. Despite their long hair, Lunacy went over well, and NEHC wowed the audience with another rendition of “Reagan Hitler.” But to a gaggle of skinheads clutching one another like ecstatic drunks, Prejustice were the evening favorites. Henry tugged at his suspenders, clutching the microphone like a weapon, ranting about lacing up his boots and getting ready for war. The skinheads loved it. Like me, the outnumbered punks recoiled. But, like me, they were afraid and did nothing.
               A scuffle broke out between songs. A couple of skins cornered a gangly boy about seventeen. He looked like me. They shoved him back and forth, anxious for the chance to beat him up. Hoping to distract them, I counted us into our last song.
               When it was over, Henry traded Sieg heils and bear hugs with the crowd that paid Brian’s mother to get in. I wondered what she thought of the audience.
I called my dad and dragged my gear to the curb as a car full of longhaired kids parked across the street. The skinheads quickly surrounded them and fulfilled their mission: they beat the living shit out of the longhairs and their vehicle. 
               Dad picked me up, and once I was safely home, I pressed EJECT on Prejustice.
     

Jason M. Thornberry’s writing appears in JMWW, Los Angeles Review of Books, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. Assaulted by strangers, he overcame a traumatic brain injury. Relearning to walk and speak, Jason earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. 

​

August 2023: Peter Rustin & Zhihua Wang

Peter Rustin

 A Slice of Time

      A.  This Boy (Ringo’s Theme)  

     There was little demand for fat, unathletic kids in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1964.  Your options were basically limited to reading.  I adored Norse mythology.  I still remember my teacher actually rolling her eyes when I eagerly informed the class that the day “Friday“ was named after the Norse goddess Frigg, who was basically in charge of marriage, prophecy, clairvoyance and motherhood.  Will you be shocked when I tell you that neither she nor anyone else in the class gave a fuck? 
 
     The only football I could play were those tabletop games where a buzzing metal surface sent hunched plastic players on little brushes scrambling crazily around the board.  Oh, and by the way?   It really had almost nothing to do with real football, and everything to do with toy companies soaking parents for a very low-tech solution that seemed high tech, in that you had to plug it into the wall.  If you got this for Christmas, you played it for a week and then it was exiled to the basement closet.  Your mom threw it away about 5 years before its vintage value would have given you a semi-decent head start on your first car.
 
     Baseball you say?  I could barely hit a wiffleball, much less a hardball thrown (at your head, natch) by a sneering, sinewy Little Leaguer.  Back in Ward Cleaver’s America, boys had only one or two lanes in which to travel.  Clearly, I was screwed.
 
     That is, until February 9, 1964.  I had vaguely heard about this in the weeks leading up to this night.  Some English band who called themselves “The Beatles” (bugs?) were going to be on Ed Sullivan.  My family all huddled around our Admiral console black and white TV with the cane-grilled speaker. 
 
     When Ed introduced “THE BEATLES”, and they burst into “All My Loving”, everything changed.  It was as if the impossibly heavy door to my future silently revolved around a tiny, jeweled bearing, and opened up the previously hidden passage to my future and my identity.  Who needed sports?  I wanted to be like Those Guys.  I wanted to be a rock and roller.  And, most specifically, I wanted to be a drummer.  
 
     I wasted no time, but you have to know that my resources were extremely limited to what was on hand in the garage, basement and kitchen.  I built a faux drum set out of paper plates.  Some old 2x4’s were my “cymbal” stands.  And, most adorably, I wrote the word “Libby” on the front of my “kick drum,”[1] unaware that Ringo’s set actually said “Ludwig”.[2]   In my defense, please note that back in 1964, Libby Foods cut a pretty wide swath through any supermarket, with their syrupy fruit cocktail being especially memorable, and not in a good way.

     My grandmother, the West Hartford Duchess of Indulgence, took me to Sears a few months later, where I bought my very first 45 single: “If I Fell” b/w “And I Love Her”.  I still have it.  Before we got to Sears, though, we had to stop at my Uncle Moe’s laundromat.  I vividly remember a hand painted sign on the wall directing customers to remove objects from their clothes’ pockets before washing, such as coins, combs, and—I’m not making this up—bullets. [3]
 
     My parents were perhaps impressed at my resourcefulness, but decidedly less than enthusiastic about any actual drumming taking place in the house.  Two years of low-grade whining, and tactical use of my grandmother’s generosity, landed me an Emenee Big Bash snare drum.[4]  It sounded like the piece of trash that it was, devoid of the snap! that a good snare drum needs.  But: baby steps.
 
     Denied a drum set for my bar mitzvah present from my parents,[5] I cleverly worked the system by using some of the money I received to buy, yes, a used Ludwig blue sparkle drum set.  Hey Ringo, over here! It’s me, the fat kid!

     B.  Tiny Pieces  
​
     Once the blue sparkle kit was mine, my parents relented and let me take lessons.  The kit resided in my bedroom, and frankly traumatized my miniature schnauzer, Alfie (not to mention everyone else in the house).  It got to the point where if I touched a cymbal, Alfie would grumblingly leave the room.
 
     I always knew I had rhythm in me.  I could always hit the beat but playing to songs was something else altogether.  So: lessons.
     My teacher, Glen, taught me the basics, but there were a couple milestones that I had to hit before I could really begin doing anything that sounded like other than chaotic bashing.  First, you may be surprised to know that about 90% of all rock songs are a basic beat in a variation of 4/4 time.  That means that your right hand plays eight notes on a cymbal or hi-hat: If you count it out, it goes one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and… .  Then, on top of that, most songs would be happy if you hit your snare on the two and four beat.  I’ll show you guys when I see you, but at first, it’s like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.  A lot of false starts and “wait…”.   Then, as if that weren’t hard enough, go ahead and kick the kick drum pedal on the ones and threes.  The concept is basically trying to achieve complete four limb independence, and the quest for that is both eternal and Sisyphean.
 
     After a few weeks of practice, I triumphantly bounded into Glen’s studio and proudly showed him that I had mastered this.  At home, I realized that this basic rock beat could pretty much work for most Beatles/British Invasion/AM radio songs.
 
     But then came a real test, and this one did not come nearly so easy.  Any boob can do a single stroke roll.  Although it sneakily begins on an off-beat, the drum intro that kicks off “Born to Run” like a cyclone is a single stroke roll.
 
     Ah, but Glen said.  You must learn the double stroke roll.  That consists of hitting 2 beats per stroke, bouncing the stick twice before repeating it on the other hand.  It’s one of those seemingly impossible things to do, but something you have to master before you can go much further.  Glen suggested that I just watch TV, with my rubber practice pad, and go slowly.  Then, I was to speed up slowly until the sticks are sort of floating in my hands and above the pad.  “Let’s see how you do in 2 weeks.”
 
     I practiced like a lunatic.  At about day 12, it clicked.  I walked into the studio:
 
     Glen: Do you have it?
     Peter: I HAVE IT!!
 
     Once I had it, it was inside of me forever and I could summon it at will.  For me, it was as if I found a new way to divide time, by slicing it into irregular but ever-tinier slivers, which, when heard in the context of a rock song, became a convincing narrative of the story of the song. 
 
     ​I still love telling those stories.  When listening to music, many people first hear the singer, or the shredding guitar.  Me, I hear the drummer slicing the 2:59 into gorgeous tiny pieces.

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Peter Rustin and his wife Leslie recently moved from Los Angeles to Peter’s native Connecticut, with their three rather intelligent cats. Peter is an attorney practicing remotely with his firm in Los Angeles. He plays guitar badly and drums decently.

​

Zhihua Wang

​Eggplants

          After cutting our fresh, garden-raised eggplants into thin slices, Grandma laid them evenly on a preheated black wok pan. She swapped the top and the bottom slices from time to time. When one side was soft and crispy, she flipped them over to cook the other side. 
          “Cooking is all about patience,” she often said. When both sides of the eggplants were of the same texture and color, she dropped some lard at the bottom of the pan. As the lard sizzled and melted, she stirred the eggplants with a long spatula. Soon the room filled with a tantalizing scent. 
          I stood watching, my mouth watering. It was worth all the anticipation as the dish tasted, as Grandma described, like long stewed pork fat with skin―​the flavor of the flesh melted in the mouth, the texture of the skin lingered for a little longer.
          Grandma knew how to control the temperature at each stage of her cooking. With her humbled utensils, she could get the natural aroma out of every vegetable. She managed other chores at her cooking intervals. She was outstanding in many ways—she could read and do math that most of her peers could not, she helped others without hesitation, she made friends wherever she went.
          But she was not always so kind to Grandpa. 
          One day, I was playing in the living room, then I heard Grandpa and Grandma arguing inside the room about some family matters. Their voices got louder and louder. Suddenly Grandpa stormed out and headed straight to the pigpen. He beat the pigs with a broom. As the pigs squealed and scurried around, he shouted, “I let you squeak; I let you squeak.”
          Grandma never allowed others to hurt her pigs, but she knew it was hard to stop Grandpa at that moment, so she yelled, “I’ll show my death to you.” Then she disappeared.
          Grandpa disappeared too after a while. Then he returned with a pale face. He told our neighbor, a nanny, that he had eaten a poisonous plant on the hill. With a bowl and chopsticks in hands, he walked to the pickle jar as it was said that pickles could speed up the dying process. He told the nanny, “I want to die before Grandma.” 
          The nanny stopped Grandpa and told her son to find Grandma. Grandma was found chatting at a friend's house. 
          Grandpa died after eleven days. 
          That day, when the IV fluids stopped entering his body, we all lined up before him. Grandma told Grandpa to rest well, she also mentioned me in her words to Grandpa, “Your youngest grandchild, Zhihua, has just joined the elementary school, you can rest in peace now.” Then she covered his face with a flowery handkerchief.
          ​I was six then and did not make a judgment. Even now, it is hard. Grandma lived a long life. In her old age, she moved to live with us in the city in a tall building. I always saw her silhouette standing at the window, looking into the distance. Did she ever regret the quarrel with Grandpa? Or was she used to being alone? I never asked when she was alive, and now, I will never know.

Zhihua Wang’s poems have appeared in Aji, Last Leaves, Across the Margin, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Arkansas and is working on her first poetry collection and a collection of translated poems.

​

May 2023: Randy Goggin, Paul Hostovsky, & Janice Northerns

Randy Goggin

 
A Man Hit by a Car in Holiday, Florida
 
          He was lying face down on U.S. Highway 19, just north of the Alternate 19 junction. His body had landed six feet out from the bumper, his blue jeans down to his knees. I smelled oak leaves burning from someone’s back yard, and a panhandler was dancing for change between reds. No one stood with the man; he was lying alone – his shoes thrown from his feet.

           The driver of the Altima was talking on the phone, a middle-aged woman wearing business attire. We assumed she was the driver, but we’d pulled up after the fact. She was the only one crying and diverting her eyes. It bothered me she wasn’t there at his side. We saw the hole his body made in the windshield.

          We moved closer to check for any signs of respiration. He wasn’t conscious, and we couldn’t tell if he was breathing. If he was, they were only small, shallow breaths. We both wondered how he’d landed so far out from the car, but we knew for sure that he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. I thought of checking for a pulse in his wrist, but I wouldn’t have known what to do if he lacked one. All we knew for sure was that we shouldn’t move his body. We were seventeen and had never seen anything like this. I felt helpless, seeing his bare ass exposed to the world.

          The lines of traffic had grown, stretching back in the direction of Pasco County. More people got out to get a better look. Laura commented on how sad it was that he was alone and how the hole in the windshield seemed too small for his body - the love handles and that thick, barrel chest. But we knew he’d fit through somehow. The human body must contort at high speeds, we reasoned, becoming more eel-like in flight. The image of him slipping through the glass like an eel gave me chills. I thought of octopuses, how they could squeeze their head-footed forms through tight spaces. The ambulance was taking so long to get there.

          We wondered why the driver was together with this guy. They didn’t seem to fit the part of a couple. I imagined him in the passenger seat with his leather vest and chain wallet, then her in her work clothes after a long day at the office. If he was a lover, wouldn’t she have been down on her knees by his side?

          I thought of the human skull, how much blunt force it could withstand. Dad told us about skulls when he had too many beers – of all the fights he’d gotten into back home in New York: at campfires, in high school, out on Rockaway Beach. I’d been in so many fights by the time I was your age, he’d say, then he’d stare as if seeing what I had to say in response. It was hard to tell if he was disappointed or just really drunk.

          Don’t punch them in the skull, or you’ll break your fist. He had a grocery list of things to do in fist fights: If your good fist gets broken, use your elbows and forehead. Elbows are tough, but you lose your reach advantage. If you can, use the palm of your hand, at the base. Then he’d demonstrate by slamming one base of the palm into the other. And if you’re going to get punched, take it on top of the head. You guys don’t know how easy you’ve got it.

          I felt cold as I studied the man’s body, taking in the sight of his middle-aged pasty face – a face drained of all color with curly locks of brown hair. I smelled pine now burning in the air. Laura turned and watched what few stars she could. When I held her shoulder, her head tilted so that her jaw touched my skin. There was still no ambulance, and this guy could’ve been dead. There was nothing we could do but just stand there and wait. I imagined souls dislodging themselves from their bodies.

          Out in the field, I could see the old drive-in theatre, its entrance and exit gates all chained up. The old projector screen was still standing – towering over the flat, paved-over spaces of the surrounding landscape. Long enough back, and this was all ocean floor. I felt naked beneath the stars and spiral arm of the galaxy. I smelled radiator fluid leaking on a hot engine block.

          The crowd was growing and getting noisier too.  There were high school kids loitering over in the center lane. They were laughing and shoving one another, as if we were waiting for an illegal drag race to begin.  I took note of the man’s exposed ass once again, feeling embarrassed for him - his pale ass cheeks and skinny stick legs on display. I didn’t want to know what the high school kids were saying. I felt cold at the sight of their smirks.

          At one point Laura suggested he got hit while he was walking. It made sense. Then the hole would have been made from his head going through. We both wondered how we ever thought a body fit through that hole. It’s like we’d been grasping for facts, then constructing a narrative to make the pieces fit together. But now the pieces fit more smoothly. The driver hit him when he was trying to cross. He could have been leaving the Golden Nugget Lounge just up the road. Maybe he'd been going for cigarettes at Winn Dixie.

          The high school guys had spread out across the center lane. They’d gotten louder, two of them lighting up cigarettes and smoking. They kept looking at the man’s exposed skin. They were joking, and two girls walked up to join them. The girls were covering their smiles, as if they were embarrassed themselves.  I wondered if it was a social contagion that drove them, exposing a dark aspect of our nature to the world. I listened to what they said and wished that I hadn’t, their insides laid bare for the world to see.

          ​Laura asked why they were laughing, saying it loud enough for them to hear. Because they’re assholes, I said. But they weren’t listening, or they just didn’t care. I suggested covering him up and asked Laura if she had a towel. She ran back to her Jeep Cherokee and grabbed her jacket instead: a blue, Roxy windbreaker she had in the back seat.  When she laid it across his body, the high school kids stopped laughing. They watched in silence, as if the act of covering him broke whatever spell they were under. The girls too looked sober and reflective. The darkness was gone, and there was guilt in its place.

          Someone asked if anyone had called 911. The driver called, someone else said. The driver had her arms crossed and still stood off at a distance. He must have been drunk, one man suggested. No one crosses the highway like that in the dark. There’s no way you could have avoided him, a woman said to the driver. Oh my God. Is that man okay?

          An ambulance was making its way down the median from the north. It parked just past the Nissan, leaving the left lane open. The EMS crew poured out and rushed over with their gear, but they were shaking their heads and speaking low before long.  Their lack of activity looked decisive, looked final. You could see it in their eyes. He was gone, and there was no bringing him back. And just like that, we’d seen our first dead body.

          Laura asked if we could just get back in the Jeep. We both glanced at the blue jacket, but she said we should leave it. She could save up for another one. The EMS crew had tossed it aside on the asphalt, and two of them had slid up his pants. That was good what you did, I told her. Those assholes needed to see that. Can you drive? she asked, and we both got in.
​
          Two sheriff’s deputies were shouting and giving instructions. They got the traffic moving slowly through the open left lane. People stared as they passed the dead body. I started up the engine, waiting for a spot to slip in. That was so fucked up, Laura said at one point. The body now had a sheet laid across it - just a lump on the highway with people walking all around it. Someone let us in, and I drove through the gap. A female officer was talking with the driver, and the EMS team were mimes on their stage. The homeless man was smiling as he danced for spare change. I cracked the window to let in the air.

Randy Goggin lives on the gulf coast of central Florida, where he works as a ranger on a county-managed nature preserve. His prose has appeared in Sandhill Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Dillydoun Review, and Kairos. He loves nature, cephalopods, and long walks on the beach.

​

Paul Hostovsky

Sucky Writer
  
I write every day. Not because I’m disciplined–I’m not disciplined at all–but because I’m addicted. Addicted to writing. Writing feels good, so I do it. A lot. “If it feels good do it,” we said in the sixties. Actually, I didn’t say that in the sixties. I was still sucking my thumb in the sixties. Which felt good. So I did it. A lot.
 
Nevertheless, I suspect that I suck as a writer. I’ve suspected it all this time (while pretending to myself I was great). I think this may have something to do with the fact that I sucked my thumb until I was thirteen and a half, secretly, shamefully, inexorably. I don’t remember how it started and I don’t remember how it ended. It’s possible that it never ended but just morphed into other addictions, like writing.
 
“We give up our addictions in the order they’re killing us,” says my sponsor Phil. “Or else we just keep substituting one for another, and they kill us cumulatively.” I should tell you that it was the right thumb, never the left. I tried the left, of course, but it didn’t satisfy the way the right one did. This greatly puzzled me and I remember holding both thumbs up, one next to the other, to see if there was some anatomical difference of shape or size or curvature that I could detect, something that would explain why the right one was the go-to thumb and the left one didn’t do it for me. They were mirror images, as far as I could tell. They were like identical twins whom no one could tell apart, and the only reason I could tell them apart was because I had fallen in love with one of them. 
 
As for the writing, that addiction didn’t start until much later.  After the thumb, or maybe contemporaneous with it, was kissing the cat on the mouth, which deeply repulsed my mother. “DON’T kiss him on the mouth, for God’s sake, you have no idea all the germs percolating inside the mouth of that cat. If you have to kiss him, kiss him on the forehead.”  A chaste kiss on the forehead she could abide, but the thing was, he didn’t really have a forehead. He had a roundish little noggin with a triangular nose and two periscopic ears that had a way of changing shape like a hat changing heads on his head whenever I kissed him unrestrainedly on his oh-so-kissable mouth, his eyes dilating like the binocular view from space of a world going up in smoke.
 
There were, of course, other addictions. There was masturbation, which I thought I had invented. It was the only manual activity I could perform dexterously with my left hand. In fact, I still favor the left. But in everything else I am right-handed: throwing a ball, sucking my thumb,  writing sucky poems. I have no memory of sucking my thumb while simultaneously touching myself down there, but the evidence, i.e. the proficiency of my non-dominant hand in that department, seems to point to such a picture.
 
I picture King David lying supine in the royal bed, fantasizing about the dark-haired Bathsheba, the royal cock stiffening in the palm of the psalmist as his mouth begins to open with song. Of course, it’s hard to sing when you have your right thumb installed in your mouth. Which makes me think I must have shed the thumb finally when I picked up the pen, and started writing those plaintive love songs to Abigail Plotnik in the 7th grade. In fact, writing is the only addiction I still indulge in these days, having given up all the others in the order they were killing me. I’ll probably never give up writing, though. And if my writing mostly sucks, well, I chalk that up to the iterative evolution of the thumb.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from The Comstock Review. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com

Janice Northerns

A Life Written in Knotty Pine
 
                ​As my brothers and I finished clearing out fifty years of heirlooms and junk from our childhood home before relinquishing it to new owners, we wandered through the house, taking last looks. We photographed the pink brick exterior and the concrete flowerbed borders, the two faint child-sized footprints in our weathered sidewalk.

                ​I went on a hunt through the house for the oldest layers: the original kitchen linoleum, still visible on the pantry floor, glimpses of hardwood, now carpeted, but still bare and dusty in each bedroom closet. I ran my fingers along the curve of the decorative knotty pine post that for all of my childhood ran from ceiling to countertop, dividing the kitchen from the dining area. This piece of the house was going home with me. The post was removed a few years ago when my oldest brother remodeled the kitchen, but, of course, my parents, who came of age during the Depression,  didn’t throw it away. We found it tucked in a closet , and I immediately claimed that scalloped post, not sure what I would do with it, but sure it was a treasure.

                This wood is a signature feature of the house I grew up in. The living room, including the ceiling, is paneled in tongue and groove North American knotty pine. Kitchen cabinets, dining area wainscoting, china hutch, bathroom cabinet, and built-in telephone nook in the front hall: all knotty pine. As a sister-in-law and I took a break from packing in the mostly empty kitchen, she said, “I couldn’t stand it if the new owners painted over the knotty pine.” I felt exactly the same way, but later, I began to wonder why. What is it about that wood, especially, that seems such a touchstone for us?

                Eyeing the aged pine, I vividly recall the house as it was in its newly built 1958 glory: pink drapes and gray rug in the living room. The warmth of knotty pine kitchen cabinets brightened by Mid-Century Modern touches like red Formica countertops and a chrome dinette set with a yellow table top. Kitchen linoleum reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painting — yellow speckled with black and red and blue splotches.  Other than the living room’s brick  fireplace, the knotty pine is the most prominent remaining interior feature.

                The poet Louise Gluck writes “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” Our first  and deepest impressions are formed early,  and those rich honey-colored walls were the backdrop for some of the most vivid experiences that my four brothers and I had. On cold school mornings, those walls cocooned us as we spread Mama's homemade peach jelly on toast. Evenings, we played Monopoly or Scrabble at that kitchen table. We warmed our legs in front of the fireplace in the pine-paneled living room, and in the afternoons we watched cartoons there on our huge square black and white TV.

                Even better than watching TV was watching old 8 mm home movies. Daddy would set up the tripod and pull down a vast expanse of white portable screen with a zip. We’d settle on the floor and watch years of memories flicker silently across the screen: My older brothers, magically younger than me on film, sliding through a rare Texas snow on makeshift sleds of metal barrel tops. Horseback rides. Kid after kid blowing out birthday candles.  We also loved a poorly lit movie of Grandpa feeding catfish at his stock tank. Each time, we were amazed to see the fish jump out of the water as he held cornbread above them, though we could barely make out the scene on the dark, grainy film. That grandfather homesteaded our land in 1899. He died when I was two, so I have no memories of him except those captured in the home movies we watched in this living room, surrounded by the glow of wood.

                The knotty pine post is all I have left of our old house now. It stood leaning in a corner of the guest room of my home for over a year until one day I suddenly realized it would fit perfectly across the back of my writing desk if I laid it there horizontally.  It’s here now as I type these words,  serving as shelf for a few mementos of home—a silver roadrunner pin that was my mother’s, Daddy’s tiny gold horned toad tie tack, a miniature cup and saucer from a long-ago family vacation to Carlsbad Caverns.

                The wood has aged and darkened over the years—on this post that keeps me company as I write—and on the walls I left behind.  Mama used to lament that, saying, “It’s made the room so dark. I wish it were still as light as when we first built the house.” But I don’t regret the wood’s patina. I know it’s the varnish that darkens over time, but I like to think there’s more to it than that.

Just as a tree shows it age with rings, the walls of a house are marked by the life they’ve witnessed. How many times have I touched this wood, opening a cabinet door to pull out plates and glasses for a meal? How many times did I watch my mother reach into a cabinet and pull out salt, sugar, and cinnamon to make an apple pie? Pine is a soft wood. The kitchen cabinets in our old house are dented and nicked and scarred. Our fingerprints, though not visible, are all over the walls. Surely it is my family’s years of living that have seeped into the knotty pine, burnishing it to this deep rich glow.
​
                It is the stories of those years that so often bubble up in my memory now when I sit down to write. I look up from my laptop screen and see that knotty pine post—see the layers of my past waiting for me to write them into the story of my future.

Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum (LULP, 2020), winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. She lives in Liberal, Kansas, and is currently working on her second book, a hybrid collection of poetry and essays inspired by the life of Cynthia Ann Parker.

February 2023: Joanna Acevedo,  Peter Brav, & Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Joanna Acevedo

Small Dreams

I cultivate rejection letters. Get my fingers tattooed. On the phone, we talk about living together. I want to press my body against his the way you would press the heel of your palm into a loaf of bread. What neighborhood do we want to live in? I’m ready to make sacrifices. My fingers ache, bleed, swell. Their new designs whisper and shimmer. Another magazine thanks me for thinking of them, but no, this submission isn’t quite right for their next issue. Manhattan, the Bronx.
 
Are you sure you want to do this? he asks.
I’m sowing my oats. I would live with you on the moon, I tell him.
Have you been to the moon? he says. It’s not very hospitable.
 
I’m amazed, delighted, to be a part of a we, a unit of a measurement. How large are we? How small? Where can we fit our belongings—my couch, his clothes, my books , his knick-knacks? I’m constantly trying to figure out how small I can make myself: how to shrink myself down so I can fit myself in his pocket, and he can carry me around, close to his heart.
 
Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, you were not selected for this year’s prize. 

The city is lifeblood, its arteries and veins made of subway stations. I love my little studio apartment, but I want to nest, I want to fill a larger space with him and me. Like a magpie, I want to collect shiny objects, bring them back to my collection. Someday, I’ll lay an egg. Not a child, specifically, but maybe a plant or even a cat, something small to nurture and love, something for the both of us. I have small dreams.
 
Failure tastes like your mother speaking to you in a low voice, like warm honey thick in the back of your mouth. Like bitter melon. Like soot. I write editorial feedback at X magazine, reminding submitters to double-space their submissions, use a readable font, start every poem on a new page. Find meaning, I say, linking to poems by Eileen Myles, Dujie Tahat, Robert Wood Lynn. Poetry isn’t just the language of observation. Good writing, I posit, should make you realize what you’ve always known but never been able to verbalize. I’m not the authority on anything, but in these small moments, I am the expert.
 
We would be happy to read more of your work, as this submission generated strong interest from members of our editorial team. Please consider sending another submission in the near future, Joanna. 
 
With my new finger adornment, it’s difficult to use a fork, button my pants. I examine my digits for signs of distress, bumping them against objects by accident. He texts me: I love you. Then, a series of memes. We don’t talk about the impending move. I’m just trying to play my best hand, he said in our last Zoom call, which disturbed me. I want to believe that this is really happening, but something in me can’t.
 
I keep a Mason Jar of water by my computer, sip from it while I work. I want him to become one of my limbs; after three years apart, I want us to be inseparable. Nothing about this is rational.
 
I’m reacting on instinct, the way a mole feels its way through the dirt. 
 
We understand that the last thing you need during these difficult times is more bad news. As I'm sure you know, so much of the submission process is about finding that right match, and that's what we hope for your submission: that it finds its perfect home.
 
I just want to publish my poems, my friend Jaz said at a poetry reading recently. Define ‘publish,’  I joked. To have recognition, external validation, from a reputable literary organization, she said, and we all laughed as if it wasn’t something we all wanted, that we were all hungry for—our big break.
 
I only say I’m sorry when I’m wrong now. I only text the friends that I like now.
 
Ostensibly, we’re looking for a one bedroom. I have wild fantasies of an apartment with an office I can write in, undisturbed, or fill with books. Visions of shelving units dance in my head. I’m not a good housekeeper, can barely manage to do my own laundry, dishes. I look at StreetEasy, scrolling through West Harlem, Washington Heights, imagining myself in these photographs of empty rooms like I’m granting wishes. I want the apartment fairy to come down from the heavens and bless me with an affordable place to live. She doesn’t.
 
We enjoyed reading your work. We appreciate your interest in X journal and hope you will consider submitting to us again.
 
With swollen fingers, I type my name and address into the submission field. I sent parts of myself to journals all over the country, essays I’ve carefully penned and edited, or tossed off in a few hours with the high hopes that someone, somewhere, will want to read them. The rejections come in flurries, like snowflakes. It’s like removing warts, to send off another one. I freeze them off, then discard them in sealed medical waste bags.
 
At X magazine, I remind submitters that rhyme schemes, when done successfully, shouldn’t seem like nursery rhymes or bad Walt Whitman derivatives. I encourage them to experiment with form, language, sensory detail. We appreciate the chance to read your work but, unfortunately, it is not a good fit for us this time. I send out decline letters, feeling mad with power, some kind of karmic retribution. Then I deflate, anxious over sending out the wrong forms; double and triple-check my work.​

​

​I want a small life, and I am mostly satisfied by what I do—reading, writing, seeing friends. Prospects of being a famous author and making a million dollars have faded. Mine are not big dreams.

 Thank you for sending us X. We appreciate the chance to consider it. Unfortunately, the piece is not right for us at this moment.
 
I don’t know if we can do it, be a we. I don’t know if I can be anything more than a set of rejections, a small fish picking at a large carcass. I don’t know how to be the person he wants me to be. I don’t know who she is.
 
I want to be that person. I want to know her, braid her hair at sleepovers. I want to buy her drinks at the bar and talk to her in low voices in rooms with low lighting.
 
Thank you for sharing your essay; we are sorry to report that it has been declined by our Essay Editor.
 
While this particular manuscript doesn’t fit our editors’ current interests, we consider it a privilege that you thought of us and regret that the time constraints of being an all-volunteer non-profit preclude a more personal reply.
 
While we're grateful to have had the chance to read X, it wasn't chosen for our upcoming issue. Thank you for sending it to us, and for considering us as a home for your work.
 
Let’s live somewhere closer than the moon, he says.
 
                                                          ***
 
At the magazine, I often encourage submitters to show, not tell. “Why Today?” I ask them. What about your story is so special that you need to share it with the world, right now? These are guiding questions that we should all think about while storytelling. I learned these concepts in undergraduate and then graduate school, and applying them to my work feels like a balm. Not all poems are narrative, I say. But narrative can be a guide to show us what you’re trying to say. 
 
Narrative has always eluded me. I try to string it into my essays, and they become fragments. But isn’t that how life works? Shown a series of random jump cuts, your brain will try to make a story out of them. Our brains want to create narratives out of nothing. Make stories out of thin air.
 
                                                          ***
 
So much of my life has been about taking up space—fitting myself into increasingly small rooms, apartments, closets—and now I will be sharing my space with another person, for an indefinite amount of time. I’m not good at sharing! I crow to my friend Anna, a fellow only child. I’ve always wanted to make my body smaller, so much so that it led to an eating disorder in my teens and early twenties, and now I will be literally limited by physical space. I’ve lived in the same 300-square-foot apartment for almost a year, so I know I can live in small spaces. But to share with another person seems daunting.
 
I want to skip ahead, watch the last episode of the series to see how it ends. I want the cheat codes, like I’m in The Sims. I’m so unafraid of sending incredibly personal essays to editors all over the country, publishing stories about myself that I wouldn’t tell my best friends, but moving into a new apartment seems impossible. Fear can manifest itself in many ways. Sometimes it looks like hope, a desperate need for something that may or may not happen, but you’re too afraid to want. Too afraid to need. Too afraid to ask for, because you might not get the answer you want.
 
                                                          ***
 
With my stiff fingers, I send out another essay. Another piece of myself, ripped away like a hangnail. Eventually there will be nothing left, and I’ll be a set of chattering bones.
 
​Failure is sour in the back of the throat, like acid or bile. It tastes like rotten meat, the copper slick of blood, the stink of cigarette smoke. I keep my rejections close to the heart, so that I don’t forget them. I don’t want to forget where I came from. The work I’ve done.
 
We wish you the best of luck finding another home for your work, and we encourage you to continue submitting to us in the future.
 
When the acceptances do come, they come in quietly. They do not bring attention to themselves. Nervous like I am, you can’t startle them, because they might run away. I speak in a low voice, don’t wave my hands around. They nuzzle my fingers with contracts, contributor’s copies, honorariums.
 
I don’t need much to be happy—an apartment, a job, a person to love.
 
I keep my small dreams close to me at all times. You never know when they might come true. 

​

​

Joanna Acevedo (she/they) is the Pushcart nominated author of the chapbook List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and the books The Pathophysiology of Longing (Black Centipede Press, 2020) and Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021). She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021.

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Peter Brav

Leaving Early

             It is the first year of a new century and I have taken my 10 year-old to the only                                      
place in the Bronx I want to take my son in the year 2000. I am no fan of the Yankees.
Neither is my son but we both love this place. The old Yankee Stadium, The House That
Ruth Built, and all the majesty and history that come with it.
             It is the 5th inning when he brings up the subject of leaving. He has devoured two
hot dogs, an ice cream, two pretzels, and a 20-ounce soda in a souvenir cup. He has lost
interest in keeping score in the Yankees program purchased at the entrance gate. His team
for the day, the Phillies, is comfortably ahead and the boobirds are out in force. The
grounds crew dancing to YMCA gets his blood moving again and pizza has him declaring
we should stay through the 7th Inning Stretch.
             Rise, stretch, sing, and leave.
             We are not alone. Millions with more pressing appointments, folks each year less
willing to sit still, fight traffic, watch pitchers taking too long between pitches, bear
losing. Three or four hours and, big surprise, people leave.
            Don’t look behind you or you will too. You’ll just put your head down, ignore the
jibes of the more loyal and patient, and leave early.
            I do not fully understand it. After all, I stick out the worst of movies until the last
of the final credits. I outlast and close picnics, operas, plays, graduation ceremonies, rock
concerts, fireworks, political conventions, even sexual acts. Right through to the
sometimes-bitter end. Yet when it comes to spectator sports, enthusiasm almost always
dissolves into exit.
            I suppose it is my late father’s fault.
            It was my late mother, after all, who took me to my very first baseball game, a
Wednesday matinee in July of 1961, dragging my older sister and me on several subways
from our Queens apartment to these hallowed grounds in another borough. She was no
Yankees fan either but the Dodgers and Giants had skipped town four years earlier and
the embryonic Mets wouldn’t take to the Polo Grounds until the following season. So we
settled for Mantle, Maris, Berra, Ford.
            The home team beat the White Sox and Mom waited until the very end, hanging

outside the Players Entrance for an hour and a chance autograph. If my father had taken
​us, we would have been out of there in the 6th or 7th and I can assure that the last out
would have been heard on the car radio home. They’re all gone now, my mother and
father and most of that game’s players. There would be other games in my early youth,
mostly at Shea Stadium, and my traffic-paranoid father would yank us out of every one of
them. All I remember now is not wanting to leave but not having my own ride home.
            It was December 1974 when I realized old habits were going to be hard to break.
Ithaca, New York, Cornell leading Brown 3 to 1 in a critical ice hockey game, 20 seconds
left, time out. My friend and I excuse ourselves, pushing by tens of frigid knees towards
the end of our row at Lynah Rink, to meet up with other friends and celebrate victory
over beer at local haunt The Nines. We waited, and waited, and waited. An hour later,
they showed, and there would be no celebration, just beer. Brown 4, Cornell 3 in triple
overtime.
            It is a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon, this 16th day of July, 2000. The
Yankees are on the wrong end of a 6 to 1 score. They have managed four hits in three and
a half hours work. This House That Ruth Built has all the drama of a dark Broadway
theatre. It is the bottom of the 9th and my son has managed a second ice cream and a
second soda but he appears done for now. Strangely we are still here. We don’t really
have anywhere else to go and the only traffic looming is the line through the D train
turnstile. Yet old habits are hard to break and we have made our way to the River Avenue
exit in the left field corner.
            Stay, idiot, just stay.
            The voice is loud in my head. It doesn’t care about MTA crowds, or getting home
for dinner, or moving on to the next thing. I lead my boy by the hand to a newly vacated
seat in the third row behind the left field wall, 400 feet from home plate, Family history
and bad habits be damned. The Yankees score five in the bottom of the 9th to tie and three
more in the bottom of the 10th to win. The theatre is no longer dark but is very much
alive, thundering, jumping, and so are we, not a drop of Yankees blood between us.
            I haven’t left one inning, one out, one pitch early since. That’s the way it should be.
​
​

Peter Brav is the author of the novels Zappy I'm Not (Zappyness Media, Inc.), The Other Side of Losing, Sneaking In, and 331 Innings. His shorter work has appeared in Black Fork Review, Kelsey Review, Monarch Review, Echo Magazine, US1 Magazine, GreenPrints Magazine, and other publications. He lives part of the year in West Palm Beach.
​

Amelia Díaz Ettinger

 Searching for Morels

            This last May can be called the May of mushrooms. The plot of land that is adjacent to ours was full of morels, an extravagance of fungi in every step. We found them, round, robust, with their fruiting bodies full of those ridges that remind me of water-logged fingertips.
            My husband and I chose this private act every morning. He needed to regain his ability to walk, and this devastated forest, with its uneven ground, was the perfect place to retrain his disabled foot to climb over broken limbs of Douglas firs, ponderosas, and Tamaracks that were no longer present. The result of a clear-cut the preceding summer.
            Those early mornings we could smell the aroma of broken wood alongside the phantom remanence of pine, a faint green smell whose color was painfully absent. But in those small brown and blonde bodies, we felt a sort of renewal. Those fungi left in our hands the imprint of dirt, musk, and what can only be described as the scent of life.
            Walking slowly with our heads bowed toward the ground, we also found we could share a sacred moment. These years of isolation from the pandemic, illnesses, and the aftermath of an affair have left us both exhausted and raw. When we stopped to look around this deforested plot of land, we couldn’t help to think that this place is just a drop in the ocean of the 15 billion trees that are cleared each year for human use. But this land is next to ours. For us, it mattered. In the foothills of the Blue Mountains and our sentinel, Mount Emily, in Eastern Oregon, this adjacent acreage was housing the Great Gray owl, who came late in the afternoons and sat on the ponderosa that shades our barn. This owl gave us days on end of entertainment and an excuse to communicate cordially with each other during those days of our own fragmentation. The presence of this large bird, whose circles around its eyes seemed like the imaginings of a ​​science fiction artist, gave us pause. Here among our struggle, the beauty of a crepuscular caller was a brief moment of surrender. We delighted in its presence and, as such, began to feel that closeness not 

only to nature but to each other.
            That owl is gone now, along with all the other species that were there when the feller-buncher stripped clean those old-growth forest trees. Patches of acreage that had never been harvested for wood surround us nearby. My husband fears the lack of these trees will endanger our own trees this and future winters. Those Douglas firs, some with a girth of up to six feet in diameter, were a buffer zone for our own trees. We lost so many trees this last winter that he will have to spend time clearing areas where they have fallen on the trail we built years ago. Now, this clear-cut has erupted with the gumption of plant succession for mainly thistles and mullein. But the morels that have brought us here on these May mornings have been the only saving grace.
            Our land is not in a national forest; it is small, but it has large trees that we refuse to cut, even when we could make a significant profit. People have urged us to do this, to follow suit. They don’t see the cutting of our trees as a big loss. Just like the immobility of his foot, or the status of our marriage, these losses don’t pile up to a sack of beans in the larger scheme of things.  But for us, this is what makes all the difference, just like these morels
            Searching for the morels, we held hands, and we talked about the loss of the buffer zone to our land. And we wondered if he would ever be able to walk evenly again. This ugly clear-cut sharpened our view of the clear cuts done to our relationship. This destruction of life, with its consequent invasive species, and horrendous loss of fauna, gave us something small to treasure: the morels. Left undisturbed, this small forest will lead to a succession that hopefully, one day can become a forest again. If it can regain that strength and the Great-Gray can find peace here, maybe our relationship can also lead to a flourishing of new memories. For us, for now, we are content with eating fresh morels from a devastated forest.
 

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. Her published books include Learning to Love a Western Sky  (Airlie Press), a bilingual collection, Speaking at a Time/Hablando a la Vez  (Redbat Press), and a historical poetry chapbook, Fossils in a Red Flag, (Finishing Line Press). She has an MFA from Eastern Oregon and an MS from Washington State University. Her poetry and short stories appear in many literary journals and anthologies.

 August 2022: Lissa Batista  &  Paul Hostovsky 

The Lyric Essay Bicycles Like Moon Cycles “In Phases”
by Lissa Batista

     1. New Moon /🌑/

The sky turns black canvas like the paper for a lyric essay. Watch for the clouds that swim like squid ink. Remember that squid ink is a smoke screen, a mucus ball meant to act as a decoy. Write it down. Write down how no one knows why clouds take forms like perfect squares or a roll over the ocean. There was a moment when New Moon was my favorite Twilight book; I  read it more than 14 times. In New Moon, Bella sees Edward, hears him as she puts herself in danger. How many times have we forsaken ourselves for love? Look for the moon nestled between the sun and the earth; the moon is gone; finding ourselves; we point to constellations between red-eye airplanes; between staccato of coral clouds; the blip of our finger; a scene in E.T.; there it is; it should be; the blip; a lyric essay; the New Moon.

     2. Waxing Crescent Moon /🌒/

I was born under a waxing crescent moon. Out of the darkness, a sliver of eyes. My mother said I cried out once. Not a cry. A howl. I’d sleep all day and insomniac with a stuffed Baby Sinclair from Dinosaurs in the crib at night. Lunar personalities describe the influence of the moon based on their shape at the time of your birth. I look for the waxing crescent moon when describing a lyric essay. A creaky open door. A door, a choice. I open the doors, walk through them. After the blank canvas of the new moon, I have an idea. This idea may change, but I celebrate the small victories, a slivered moon. I grasp the door knob; the muscles on the back of my hand ripples like pages. I, like the lyric essay, don’t back down.  In lunar personality, if one was born under the waxing crescent moon, they represent the light that never yields. The lyric essay does not back down, the lyric essay maracas through an open door, confronting the waxing light like a coiled rope, a diamondback snake. You don’t know what to expect just yet, but you’ve walked into a planetarium; you observe the wide sky; the piece of moon; your idea as hazy as the milky way off in the distance; present.

     3. First Quarter Moon /🌓/

It’s telling that those who first studied the moon were more poets than mathematicians. Follow along, I am neither a scientist, nor have I passed a math class the first time since middle school. The first quarter moon is one-fourth of the way through its cycle around the earth. It is also 50% illuminated by the sun at this point. Honestly, the moon doesn’t care about math. The moon is a philosopher. The moon would understand that the lyric essay is a philosopher, too; both yearning to understand the world from an outsider’s perspective. The moon chips. A fragment. It slips under the sun’s dressing screen. Its fragment skips orbits like smooth stones to see how far it will go. Philosophers are loners, but they are not lonely. The lyric essay is alone. It is not a poem. It is not fiction. It is not a five-paragraph argumentative essay. It wants to be all of those things and it can be, at once. However, in a world of cookie cutters, the lyric essay, like the misguided term half moon, has no mold.

     4. Waxing Gibbous Moon /🌔/

In the morning, the moon in gibbous refuses to sleep. By noon, the sun is no longer deserted; the gibbous, a camel’s hump, sands across the sky in between the spaced summer cirrus. The sun and moon share an atmospheric stage; the clouds tango. An affair with the moon reflects an affair I’ve witnessed my parents having. My parents, like the sun and moon, wanted to close the gap of their relationship by welcoming one more, it was supposed to be as temporary as Miami storm clouds. When I found them together, it was a recording, a screensaver, a coming to full circle of what I would understand the parameters of loving but not knowing how to, yet. The gibbous give us permission to first find out what is happening, and how has it been possible for it to go on for so long. The lyric essay isn’t about the answer, it is the journey.

     5. Full Moon /🌕/

I’m back-to-back with a friend. The game, Masters of Light, commands us to give into the universe, tap into each other’s energy; we play under the full moon. Guess what another is thinking, is showing us—our backs are the channels to our thoughts. During the full moon, surgeons may refuse to operate because patients are more likely to die through blood loss. Doctors see more patients with mental health issues than at any other time. Lunatic comes from lunacy, going mad during the full moon (lunaticus = moonstruck). More babies are born during this time. In Sri Lanka no one kills, no one drinks alcohol, no one goes shopping when the moon is full. Buddha’s birth, his Enlightenment, and his passing into Nirvana all occurred during a full moon. The lyric essay, like the full moon, is full of power. Both influence us to seek out risk. When we find it, we are rewarded with the guided light from the reflection of the full moon. We go back home. At home, I’m back-to-back with my friend. She draws a full moon pearled with altocumulus clouds. She says there is a mystery to uncover, but I, like the full moon, am unaware of it. Mysteries are what people are drawn to. At the same time, the full moon is fully illuminated, hiding nothing. What do you think you’ll feel when you are back to back with me?

     6. Waning Gibbous Moon /🌖/

The sun and moon are lovers. The sun is selfish. The full moon lasts less than 15 hours before it begins to recede under the shadow of the sun’s skirts. If my love were as beautiful as the moon, I’d be jealous too. The waning gibbous moon is a moon who wants a break. Maybe I am dating the waning gibbous, too. The man I’ve been seeing for eleven years calls me this morning; he wants out. He says we are two paternals, I heard we are too paternal. He says he needs a maternal. Oh. When the sun and moon break up, the earth suffers. He says he doesn’t know what our break up is going to look like, our son is our earth, we don’t want to fuck it up. A gibbous moon; the lyric essay. It demands self-reflection, its own break-up, where you step away from the page because the lyric essay is tired of making sense. Sometimes it simply wants to be. I wonder what makes me paternal; is there too much diamondback rattlesnake in me? Leo, my sign, is a sun sign. I am the sun, and the brighter light has dominated my space. I am a diamond back eating its own tail, forever, an infinity sign, the ouroboros: a cycle of life, death, rebirth. As a partner, the gibbous moon submits to the sun’s shadowed whip. But a closer look reveals the whip is just a ranunculus flower—stern stem, paper petals.

     7. Third Quarter Moon /🌗/

The moon gives into the darkness, halfway there. It is older, maturing, three-fourths through the cycle. The moon is a traveler that has seen half the world. Don’t be fooled; it’s easy to believe  the moon is  fading. That giving in and letting go is a sign of weakness. We tell our men not to cry, yet the moon weeps daily. Looking up at a third-quarter moon is intimate, nearly voyeuristic. It is watching the moon shower, one leg on the lip of the tub,  shaving one leg at a time. He is preparing a candlelit dinner for one in Rome on an iron-veined-fenced-in balcony. The sun is not invited. He will gusto with antipasti, pick up black olives with his bare fingers, suck olive oil from under the nail. He will eat pasta as an appetizer and pizza as a main dish, then tiramisu the night away. He will espresso, then kiss the cook. In the morning, the sun finds the moon waning to bed. There is a letter. The moon asks for forgiveness. The lyric essay, after free writing, observing, connecting the universal and personal, asks the reader for forgiveness, too. Not for what he’s done. For what he is about to do.

     8. Waning Crescent Moon /🌘/

The waning moon is known as balsamic; balsamic vinegar from specific grapes. It’s versatile. Use balsamic to drizzle after the meal is finalized; pasta, salad, ice cream, meats, cheeses, strawberries, anything hazelnut, pizza. Balsamic, like the dark moon, is meant to highlight. An accent. The dark moon is underrated, but for those who worship the moon, the dark phase is perhaps the most important. It reminds us of our intentions that were set with the new moon last month. The dark moon, the most forgiving. The winter of phases, still it springs. The lyric essay phases. It bicycles, like the moon, travels through its own cycles, recurses, and begins again. The lyric essay is a conduit. A philosopher. An ouroboros. A bulge of water rippling over earth.

Lissa Batista is a Brazilian-born poet raised in Miami, Florida where she is an MFA candidate at Florida International University. She lives with her hairless cat and her son as she teaches language arts to middle schoolers. Her works can be found or forthcoming with Bellingham Review, Tofu Ink, Tint Journal, and others.

                                                                                           

 The Poetry of Braille
 by Paul Hostovsky

Some of us, like Shelley, like to write standing up. Some of us, like Albert Goldbarth, like to write on long yellow legal pads, and when the poems are done, says Goldbarth, he types them up on his manual typewriter. He proudly claims that his fingers are “computer-virgin;” they’ve never touched a computer keyboard. We poets have our quirks, that’s for sure. Here’s mine: After I’ve written a poem, I like to type it up in Braille. Then I read it with my fingers. To feel the words. Literally.

​I’m not blind, but I am, weirdly, an avid Braille reader. I learned it years ago, when I had a blind roommate. Actually, I learned it visually first, because the dots cast these tiny shadows that make it possible to see them in the light. (Think of a country of igloos as seen from an airplane on a sunny morning in the Arctic.) It took me about a year to master the hundreds of configurations of dots that make up the letters, punctuation, composition signs, and contractions of Braille. And then, a few years after that, as though of their own volition, my fingers started gravitating toward those dots, trying them, plying them, and eventually I began reading Braille tactilely. I’ve been reading it with pleasure―physical pleasure―ever since.

I don’t write my poems in Braille, but I do like to read them in Braille–I like to read anything in Braille–and then I revise them (“re-vision”) because Braille helps me see them differently, and hear them differently. Braille slows me down, in a good way. It’s a good thing. As a poet, and a reader, Braille is one of the ways I maintain contemplation, focus, and sanity in this digital age we all live in. On the subway, for instance, while most if not all of my fellow passengers are hopelessly―​blindly―hooked up to their smartphones and tablets, I sit there with my own poems in Braille, reading them over with my right index finger, blithely scanning the poor doomed plugged-in ridership with my eyes wide open.

I like the idea of touching the words. I know it’s just a romantic notion―I mean, Braille readers aren’t more “in touch” with the words than print readers are―but I like it nonetheless. Though it took me some time to develop the sensitivity required to read with my fingers, I’m not sure I can claim that Braille has made me a more sensitive reader per se. But it has made me a more versatile one: I can read with my eyes closed; I can read with the book closed (my hand tucked inside it, reading); I can read in the dark when my wife wants to go to sleep and has turned off the light; I can read in the dentist’s chair while he’s drilling away; I can read while walking; I can read while driving―left hand on the wheel, right hand on the dots, eyes on the road―eyes on the road!

Compared to someone who grew up with Braille, I’m slow; only a little better than that third- or fourth-grader whom the teacher has asked to read a poem aloud in class and who does it somewhat haltingly, occasionally stumbling over the words, having to sound them out when getting stuck. But I remember watching my blind roommate Gilbert reading Braille all those years ago. He had grown up with Braille, so he read with the fingers of both hands, fluidly, fluently, gracefully, and as quickly as any sighted reader can read print with her eyes. The way his hands would dance across the Braille page, it was a beautiful choreography to behold: the left hand beginning each line, handing it off to the right hand halfway across the page, the right hand finishing as the left hand moved down to start the next line―left hand to right hand to left hand to right hand―expert, fleet, like a concert pianist, or like relay runners in a race, the handoff accomplished seamlessly over and over, line by line down the page, page by page through the book.

I used to worry that people who saw me reading Braille in public―on the subway, say, or in a Starbucks―would think I was blind or pretending to be blind. A sighted person reading Braille, after all, is a rare sight, wouldn’t you say? So for a long time I was in the closet about my Braille reading. I only read at home, or in my car. Or, if I ventured out in public with my Braille, I would read it furtively, sort of cloak-and-dagger, Braille-in-coat-pocket, keeping it hidden under my jacket or inside my knapsack, fingering the dots clandestinely, feeling somehow vaguely illicit about the whole thing. At the Starbucks, for example, I would build a little fort on the table around my Braille―backpack, cup of coffee, folded sweater, water bottle―ramparts surrounding the treasure of the dots, hiding the Braille so that no one would see me reading it and mistake me for a blind person, or a blind impostor, or a blind wannabe.

I am not a blind wannabe. But I do love Braille. I love the physicality of it. There’s something deeply satisfying about using my sense of touch to access language, knowledge, and especially my own poems. Also, I love the irony of choosing Braille―preferring it―over the digital technology that is everywhere around us shouting its claims of “the world at your fingertips.” Of course, there are Braille computers and Braille technology too―so-called refreshable Braille or paperless Braille. But I prefer the paper myself. I’ve always preferred the paper. And while, admittedly, I am writing this little essay on my laptop, I do still have a manual Royal typewriter at the ready, like Goldbarth, with a fresh ribbon, for the times when we lose power (which has happened three times already this year).

Braille isn’t a language―it’s a code―but it can accommodate any written language on the planet. When I first learned it, I was in my early twenties and I had none of the attendant grief and/or denial that a person who is losing their vision will likely experience. For me, it was just a hobby, something to do, a word game, a curriculum of puzzles. More than anything it was fun! It was all about words and I have always loved words.

In Braille, there are some 200 contractions―or shortcuts―which means most words aren’t actually spelled out letter by letter, but, rather, contain these contractions that are symbols for clusters of letters or smaller words within words. As an example, the word “distinguished” contains 4 contractions (dis, ing, sh, ed). The contractions for the words and, the, for, of, and with can occur alone and also within words, such as the and in Andrew, the the in Catherine, the of in roof, the for in fork, and so on. In addition, almost every letter in the alphabet, when standing alone, stands for a whole word. B is but, C is can, D is do, E is every, F is from, etc. F with a dot five in front of it is father. M with a dot five is mother. M all by itself is more. There are also certain lower-cell contractions (to, into, by) that attach to the subsequent word or character without a space in between, though this does not occur in print. Many things in nature attach to the subsequent character. Barnacles. Burrs. Baby sloths. And so do certain lower-cell Braille contractions. Braille, you see, like poetry, is all about compression, and there is a kind of poetry of Braille that only a Braille reader can appreciate.

The DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark, whose first full-length collection, How to Communicate, is forthcoming from Norton, is well-versed in the poetry of Braille. “Andy,” he says, “is a square. Sandy is a square with a ponytail.” Translation: the Braille contraction for “and” is dots 1,2,3,4,6, which resembles an opening bracket [, while the letter Y in Braille is dots 1,3,4,5,6, which resembles a closing bracket ]. Put them together and you get [], or “Andy,” a square. The S in Braille, dots 3,4,5, resembles a sort of serpentine cedilla, a kind of tail. Put it in front of Andy, and you get Sandy (with a ponytail).

Clark has also composed dozens of what he calls Slatekus, a variation on the Haiku, each poem containing the same number of lines that his Braille slate contains as he makes the dots with his Braille stylus, and also the same number of characters, or cells, that the slate contains. So he has invented his own form. It may look like tennis with the net down to the uninitiated reader, but in fact it’s Braille with the paper face-down, the stylus dancing out the dots and scanning the exact number of cells in the Braille slate, no more and no less. In one such poem, he plays with the idea of “ghost dots”, or the dots in each cell that are NOT raised, that offer a kind of negative image, or ghost, with its own surprising message and music.

My blind roommate Gilbert once told me that the word “ice” in Braille always makes him think of a little hill: the upward climbing i, the crest of the c, and the downward sloping e. That image first came to him when he was introduced to Braille at the school for the blind in Pittsburgh at the tender age of 5. And now I, too, think of that little hill every time I come across the word “ice” in my Braille reading: I think of Gil, age 5, and the little hill that will always live inside of that word. Words inside of words. Landscapes and pictures inside of words. Whole worlds inside of words. Isn’t that what poetry is, for those of us who love poetry?

Native fluency in Braille is something I will never be able to achieve. Nevertheless, my tactile reading speed has noticeably improved over the years. And while I’m proud of that fact, I also want to remember this other, perhaps more important, fact: reading Braille slows me down, the same way that reading poetry slows me down. It’s one of the things I love about Braille. It’s one of the things I love about poetry. In a way, wanting to read faster runs counter to that desire for slowing down, for going slow, for being present, for being more in touch with the words, more in touch with the world.


Paul Hostovsky's latest book of poems is MOSTLY (FutureCycle Press, 2021). He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter and Braille instructor. Website: paulhostovsky.com

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May 2022: Phoebe Hyde  &  Lúcia Leão 

On Bitterness After a Fail and Getting the Heart to Beat Again

by Phoebe Hyde

The universe only doled out so many heartbeats. You understood this, even though you
were younger. In agreeing to pull a new, unmade thing from the ether—a work, an idea, a
movement, a  gift for all that called to you for help in being made—you knew you must
spend those heartbeats. You would give some part of your life for this work, employing
every skill, talent, and insight to get it as right as you could, as right as it deserved. So in
working, you drove harder and risked more than most thought wise. You pushed, sacrificed,
forewent shortcuts. Other people’s less fraught efforts constantly flicked past in the wind―
you were still heartened by the merit of your task and driven by the imperfection of your
current results. You toiled in obscurity for a long time but you grew, the work improved,
and together you advanced.   And when the time came for the work to matter―a mattering
that would rise and fly far beyond you, puny originator―you went for it on behalf of the
universe itself. You jumped, you offered, you threw wide the doors, you turned the key, you
grabbed the mic, you pressed send. For one moment you were lifted and held aloft by joy.
The work― fully realized and done right― was sanctified and set apart from time. 

But then nothing. 

No one showed. No one was waiting in line that day, no one was listening for truth, no one
joined the song, or claimed your offered gift. Strangers shut the door in your face. Or worse,
those who’d smiled and promised to wait for the work  turned away, shredded the contract,
moved the target trampoline, ripped their hand from yours without explanation or apology.

You fell. You dropped through the air, you ignited underneath and blew up, you skidded out
of control, rolling over and over. There were flames, blood, vomit, gasoline, breaking metal,
screams (your own?), then blinding light and roaring darkness. All of it you saw, heard, felt,
thinking ―​Is it really me who is living through this? The horror was inescapable because
you were the work and the work was you –locked together by design, now a fiery public
disaster: Cagemaker trapped inside burning masterwork! The screams and flames took a
long time to die down, and from within them, you thought: let me go down with the ship. 

No one sent an ambulance or came running—this was the cruelest surprise. Some did
approach the wreckage with you still inside, paralyzed by pain—and offered tepid
condolences, a pat on the back, meet for a quick coffee next week? Others, who dreamed
but never dared—cast satisfied sidelong glances, even nodded.  You came to understand the
crash was widely seen as your punishment, even though there had been no malice in your
effort. You didn’t murder, trick, steal, or do evil, and yet you must be a megalomaniac to get
this: exactly what you deserved. No one said this aloud but you heard it. It would have been
safer to be a criminal, a cheater, a liar, or a cynic. Badness was easy to forgive or condemn;
no one knew what to do with ambition. When you finally had strength to cry out, the sky
opened and choked you with hail, snow, and rain all at the same time. 

*

 Anger makes you sit up; hatred for the weather and bad Samaritans walking blithely past.
With broken arms you claw the work’s smashed pieces toward you and prop them up to
cover and conceal yourself. This carapace is hardly a barrier between you and the world’s
shitstorm, but you pull it close like damaged beetle wings and, inside, worry your wounds,
pick at the splinters, and grieve.  

In time—because you’re regrettably not dead—you enlarge this exoskeleton so you can sit
and stand. You shove the wreckage into a drab bunker, a dim mausoleum/museum in which
you are the sorry, silent docent: languishing, analyzing, contextualizing, self-medicating. No
visitors allowed. They only want to be reassured that they are winners and you are a loser.
They don’t value your company because you are valueless, a cipher in a collapsing hole
mortared with hatred, jealousy, and grief, and these callous self-accepting idiots want to
hose down the walls with St. John’s Wort and really helpful podcasts.  Fuck them. 

Unfortunately, others refuse to respect your private hideout. They consider it your rank
corner of a room you all share, and they waltz in freely, bringing you unwelcome to-do-lists
(that they need done), bringing you your agenda (within-their agenda). You are supposed to
be grateful for them expecting civil responses and active participation, for emailing you
with quotidian questions and requesting timely follow-up; for whining about clean
underpants and buttered toast. Some of them ask you to sweep up your scabs and old
bandages on the floor, or take out all this messy trash—meaning, you suppose, your self-
worth. Whatever it is they need and want from you, it isn’t the aspect of yourself you
cherish most, the aspect that made the work. This is crushing. This hurts as much as the
crash, but this pain is interior and altering, like a parasite, or genetic sequence forcing
metamorphosis. You wonder if this pain is supposed to be good for you, like the insect
nymph that leaves the water for mud so it can learn to fly. Maybe they are helping you
discard the foolish selfishness of the beloved work and they should be your work now, their
utilitarian agendas your redemption. 

So you serve them.  You will make and do and exist for them from the shadowy side of their
more important house.  It’s a roof over your head, after all. But your limbs are still weak and
your brain is glitchy, and you lost your tools in the crash. So you collect what is left of the
work—scraps, raw materials—and you numbly grind it up with your teeth and your sore-
covered hands and feet until it is powdery and fine, and you bottle it in something
inconspicuous and ordinary like an old salt shaker.  This substance you place in a nearby
cabinet and you use it to serve, except the serving becomes a performance: See how I have
remade the foolish into the commonplace and useful? See my resilience? My grit? Here I am
making the best of a bad thing, so take my offering! I don’t care if it tastes bad, just fucking
take it! 

What you serve is salt. Salt, salt, salt, it goes on everything, is inside everything, is sprinkled
over  and baked into everything. Salt is your signature flavor! It repulses those you serve,
and it shames you to sicken them, but open the cabinet and guess what’s there? Same bad
joke, same old shaker that always pours too much.  And it’s not like you can’t taste it
yourself. Behind your basically on-time emails and your almost-competent social
interactions—still blooming in the back of your throat as you pace and peer out windows at
a threatening world—is that wretched flavor.  By now, you know it doesn’t come from the
work, it comes from you: you made what failed because you are failure, serving it, tasting it,
being it, spreading it now and forever.

You know this thinking is a problem. Too much salt kills. And you sometimes remember the
days before the crash. You recall living. But how to live as a mistake? Once salt goes into a
dish—as bitterness pervades the soul—there is no getting it out again. You cannot go
backwards, re-birthing yourself as a different, ambitionless person. You cannot unhope the
hopes, or turn all those days of right effort into wrong. These things formed your bones.
The lines on your face tally every heartbeat spent. 

 So how? 

One day you make it out to the front stoop, no further. Your feet are bare, and you don’t have
a coat or a plan (because where would you go?) but the sun feels good on your scars and
temporarily gilds angst with dramatic golden light. And from within that brief pleasure,
something wells up: 
             A dish can’t be unsalted, but salt dissolves. 
             You sit motionless. Come again? But no, you get just this, a metaphor that is lame but
maybe functional: add more to a salty pot― water, noodles, sauce…or ideas, efforts,
attempts?—and a sickening flavor becomes only overpowering. Add more again and
overpowering becomes too strong. Too strong, becomes just right, only enough to enhance,
counterpoint, embellish. Salt has its uses, for sure. 

Sitting in the light and fresh air, you remember a thing you learned long ago, while you were
engaged with an earlier work—one that also crashed and burned but somehow did not stop
you from trying again, maybe because novices know better than to be defined by what they
make while learning. And the thing was this: every heart needs salt to beat. The contraction
of muscle fibers depends on the movement of electrically-charged sodium molecules
through the cardiac sodium channel. The molecules are activated, then inactivated. The
heart of every complex living creature designed to survive by gauging its chances and then
taking a risk—requires salt, not in stasis but in flow.  Balance is lost, imbalance corrects.
Channels open and close.  This is how it works. Not smooth and steady but up and down, go
and no-go, zeros and ones, again and again, a million million times. 
             You understand that you are not the work. 
             You understand you are the heart, beating as long as you can, doing everything right. 


Phoebe Hyde's memoir The Beauty Experiment was published in 2013 by Da Capo/Perseus and their essays have appeared in the NY Times, Salon and the LA Times Magazine.

SoFloPoJo is delighted to welcome Lúcia Leāo as our new copy editor

​What? 

by Lúcia Leão

I am an immigrant writer. I write from the ear.  It is not only the language spoken around
me that is different, there is also the one in which I grew up with, interacting with me,
from near and far, while I write, and while I read. I am not talking about memories per
se, but about sounds. 

My linguistic umbilical cord is partially attached to a previous state, even after almost 30
years of citizenshipping abroad. But, as the attachment changes in nature, what once
felt like some kind of unity becomes spread, and more present. 

When I sit down to write, or when potential poems come to me in the middle of life’s
tasks, it is not unusual for me to feel the words arriving from varied places, in sonority.
One simple example: I may think of “the”−an article−and the word/sound may touch me
as a “de”−a preposition, in Brazilian Portuguese, although they are not an exact
sonorous match. 

The sounds are usually clear, and they generally come in a rush. The words they carry,
if translated into English, don’t necessarily make sense for the poem I am trying to write.
One example: When thinking about “mail,” I may hear “meu” (mine), or the other way
around, and this seems to “work” at some level. Then I need to understand what
connections the brain−The heart? The whole body? An ethereal community?−is
making, the paths with which the images are experimenting. Is this a random act, or like
some would say, just play? Is there an idea being hunted, and if so, what is it? Is it only
melody or some hybrid lyrics?−And, then I wonder… Is the mail delivered to my house
always “mine”?  Is there a poem in there?


My writing lives in the suburbs, 
cushioned and air-conditioned. But not 
all the time. My exile is fiction. 


In the past months, I have been preparing what will become my first book of poems. 
Noticing the majestic presence of geography in my writing, I let out a sigh. I use
“majestic” to refer to geography, as in “majestic mountains,” defining a mood, creating
shadows in a landscape. I don’t need to do a word search through my pages to know
that land is a prominent theme, with ocean, rivers, and bridges composing a scenario of
longing.  

To live in a place that I do not know is nothing
compared to living in a place that does not know me.

A great deal has been written about identity and authorship in writers working with an
additional language. In my experience, as the additional language becomes closer to
the surface of the days, the impact on the search for identity gets clear. I notice two
movements that affect identity formation and expression: the apparent need to have
“one” reality, and the impulse towards making all realities even more separated. They
interfere with my bilingual composition of lines. 

What I am reporting here is not new, of course, not unique. What is fascinating, to me, is
to be able to see so closely how a certain opacity is illuminated by elements related to
meter, rhythm, and rhyme−just to be thrown, in many cases, into opacity again. It is
almost as if the languages are brushing against each other, talking to each other, and I
can hear them pass by and talk. “What? Yes… I think I get it now.” But no, not
completely. I am never sure of what they are trying to get from each other, what they are
exchanging. Sometimes it is as if I am struggling not to let the edge of a cliff slip from
my grasp. While I stand on this land, I listen the best I can.  

First, I looked for a place to house the writing. 
Now, I write beyond windows.   
​
This perambulation involves descriptions. Identity can be defined as the description of
what makes us, and what people see of who we are. It can also be what we find while
we survey territories, be they concrete, remembered, or imagined.  

In my story, the gradual, and then sudden perception of my surroundings happened in
language. Moving to the suburbs in a foreign country was a quieting shock, one that
brought watchfulness to my vocabulary, my hearing, and my sight. One day I realized
racoons and ferns, lizards and orchids renting out trees were regulars on my pages.
Hurricanes and storms seen on a sky so big I am personally hurt every time they allow a
tall building to be born. Words recognized they had new neighbors, and their chat
became part of my writing life. This may go unnoticed for someone who reads my work,
but I am aware of what is happening here. 

I was born in Brazil and grew up in a dictatorship. This is not what defines me. I mention
it because it helps me to go back to the sounds where this essay started. Music was an
outlet and a tangible place where to feel, and search for, political freedom during those
years. I don’t remember having deep political conversations at home. My family was
reserved in these matters, for fear or conviction, or both, but I remember music was a
daily meal in our house. We listened to Brazilian songwriters who offered narrative
songs, vivid and critical (Chico Buarque), and lyrics with a higher level of abstraction
and linguistic rebellion (Caetano Veloso). 

In the ‘80s, when Brazilians took to the streets to demand presidential elections and the
end of military rule, a popular song by Milton Nascimento became a sort of national
hymn and moved us to continue.  

My writing process as a writer who thinks and creates in more than one language shows
me how much I have to learn. The mechanisms of the languages I use expand each
day. I also need to learn myself anew in these curious interactions of the Self(s) with a
chatting, multilingual environment. 

It feels natural that sounds in more than one language grab me when a poetic
construction is about to happen. They invite me to stay, to follow them, to help them rest
for a while in one of their possibilities, to open them up in a neighboring living, and muse
on what they bring. Although words come with the meanings they carry, that initial
movement pulls me away from thoughts and ideas. This heightens the playfulness I
associate with writing, the way puddle jumping can bring depth to mental connections.
This pull gives me the chance to release part of the tension of dualities, a feeling of
coexistence taking me towards an open space, in this−linguistic−community.


Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her poems have been published in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, among others. Her work is also included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing. Lúcia has been living in Florida for more than 25 years.

Essays of previous issues curated by Freesia McKee

February 2022 

​Finding the Shore More Often
by: Will Carter

          Recently, I talked to a friend of mine who is a fellow stroke survivor, and he said
something to me that I've been thinking about. We were talking on the phone, and he paused and
asked, "What did acceptance look like?" 

          We were talking about the process of grief after a stroke.

          In 2007, I was in a car accident, and I suffered a subdural hematoma and stroke in my
occipital lobe. In regular speak, I experienced a traumatic brain injury and a stroke in the back of
my brain. The stroke weakened my left side and cost me a fourth of the vision in my left eye.
Additionally, I suffered a ruptured spleen, a collapsed lung, and I lost a third of my left ear. I was
damaged, a seventeen-year-old with a stroke and a brain injury, slowly losing mass in a hospital
bed. 

          The brain injury affected me more than the stroke really. I mean, the weakness in my left
side made it so I walk with a cane; my hand can be shaky, and my left fingers really lack
dexterity, but because of my brain injury, I struggle with memory, focus, and coordination, and
ultimately due to my injury, I have to accept a different version of me.
But, acceptance? I don't know if I should even use such a word. It's more about finding the shore
and fighting the current that is taking you back out to sea. My accident was fourteen years ago. I
have healed a great deal. I am a husband, a father, and in August, I am starting my dream job as a
Lecturer of English. However, I still have days when I can't remember something; I still have
days when I get mixed up. I still have days when my leg is shaky, when strangers ask, "You
okay, bud?"

          Of course, I fight the urge to reply, "Do you mean physically, emotionally, or
spiritually?" Or I fight back the previous reply to this question I used to give right after my
accident, "No. I was in a fight with a bear. You think this is bad? You should see the bear. He's
dead." I apologize to all those I made feel awkward by indicating I had bested a bear in combat.
I said those things to distance myself from my injury. I said those things because I did not like
who I was after my brain injury. I said those things because I was out to sea. What I mean is that
I was out there in the breakers, drowning in the undertow of grief, denial, frustration, depression,
and the bargaining. I did not like who I was, and I dealt with it by denying that I was
fundamentally changed or by lamenting over a life (as I saw it) destroyed.
That's what I think about when I say in the water, sinking in the undertow of the different kind of
me.

          Of course, it was much harder at first. I couldn't walk; I was in a wheelchair. I wore
diapers, and almost every moment of the first few months after my accident, I was hit with a
reminder that I was not the person I used to be. I would forget; I would get lost; I would wet
myself, and I hated who I had become. So, I put all of my stock, all of my hope in the me of
tomorrow, the person who had healed, who had "gotten better", but that's just an optimist's
version of drowning. I was lost at sea for a long time.

          Then slowly, you do get better. I said goodbye to diapers. I started walking with a walker
and, then, a cane. I graduated high-school. I went to college. Now at college, I struggled for a
long while too. My first year especially, I had to spend most of my time working on school, three
classes no less. It was hard to make friends. I felt so awkward, so alone, and I drifted out past the
current into the deep. 

          Why can't I just be healed? Why can't I just be the person I want to be? Why can't I just
be smart again!? Acceptance? There's none to be found here.  

          Then, I tried therapy to get rid of my limp; I worked on getting back to driving, and
eventually during graduate school, I got reconstructive surgery to restore the third of my left ear
that was cut off in the accident. Remove all traces of disability. That's the way I can move to
acceptance. Once nobody knows about it, I can be okay with who I am. It's funny how that never
works. So, I'm treading water, waiting for a boat to take me back. My head is poking up and
down as I catch gasps of air.

          By the time I graduate with my first master's, you wouldn't know I'm struggling. I'm
cracking jokes about my disability, calling myself a crip and seeming to take it all in stride.
Then, I teach high-school, and the jokes become an even more regular thing.
You're not supposed to see it. I'll shrug it off if you do but how I want you not to see it.
I have people asking about and reminding me of my disability, so the walls go up.
And meanwhile, my air bubbles are popping at the surface. It's ten years after my accident, and I
am nowhere close to acceptance.

          Then, I meet a woman. She doesn't judge me for my disability; she is understanding when
I get things mixed up. She isn't mad when I get lost because of my terrible spatial memory.
She loves me for me, this disabled, forgetful, go to bed early, can't walk right version of me.
I start swimming. Then, I find out I have a heart condition. She stays by me. I get in a car
accident, and I stop driving. She supports me in this. We get married. We get pregnant. I get a
pacemaker. I start writing about my brain injury. In the fall, I really talk honestly with my
students and fellow faculty about it.

          And then, I'm throwing back water in a metaphorical butterfly (I cannot do the butterfly
stroke in real life), and I'm on the shore. I'm writing about my injury and being open and honest
about who I am, and I can feel the grains hot sand under my feet and the warm rays of sun on my
face. Sure, I still get dragged out to sea. Acceptance is nothing static, but I find myself on the
shore more often.
​
          If you are struggling with accepting yourself after an injury, after trauma, just know that
acceptance is not a permanent destination, but I hope that you will share your story and seek to
encourage others, and, sincerely, I pray you too can find yourself on the shore more often.
​

Will Carter is a native of Roswell, Georgia. He suffered a traumatic brain injury in October of 2007, while he was a senior in high school. After a stay at the Shepherd Center, he went on to get his M.F.A. in Playwriting & M.A. in Teaching.  Now, he lives with his wife and daughter and teaches at Kennesaw State University. He loves his job, sharing his story with his students, and encouraging them on to live their lives to the fullest.
​

Aekta Khubchandani is a writer from Bombay. She is matriculating her dual MFA in Poetry & Nonfiction at The New School in New York, where she works as a Readings Coordinator. Her fiction “Love in Bengali Dialect”, the winner of Pigeon Pages Fiction Contest, is nominated for Best American Short Fiction Anthology. Her essay, “Holes in the Body,” published by Entropy was featured on LitHub. Her work is featured in Speculative Nonfiction, Passages North, Epiphany, Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She’s working on two hybrid books that smudge prose and poetry.
​

Sofi Ivy Ripley

The 5am cat, and other minor lyricisms

​5:11am / 19 April 2020
 
In Twin Peaks there is a character named Denise Bryson. She is a DEA agent played by David Duchovny, best known for his role as Mulder in The X-files. This practice annoys me. I know she is being percieved by straight people as David Duchovny in a dress. A man in a dress. But that is a boring direction for this essay to take. Denise is boring to write about. I don't want to write about her.
 
While I am watching Twin Peaks at five in the morning, I hear the cat for which this essay is named. I think it is my parents talking in their room across the house or possibly that my father is up early and has turned on the TV in the office. But I listen a little longer and know it is a cat, maybe two of them having an argument.
 
I think there are three in total that live in the area around my house, hopping between the backyards in this part of the neighborhood. As far as I know they don't belong to anybody.
 
I get up and walk out into the living room which is dark except for the line of dim orange light that spills in through the blurred glass oval that runs the length of the front door. When I peer through the blinds I catch one of the cats—the black and gray one—padding around in the driveway and mewling to itself. There is a rusty orange cat, and a dull white one too.
 
It is hard to explain why this feels important. Somehow the cat in the moonlight carries the promise of meaning. I feel I am on the edge of describing something that—if described well—would save me. It feels connected to why I write and think about writing. It feels like this moment cannot pass without an epiphany that will change my life.
Eventually the black and gray cat slinks out of view. The street behind it is empty. The house is very quiet.
 
My mother does not know how to have a conversation with me. I believe I confound her. I believe she believes I believe she is stupid. I do not believe she is stupid. I believe we are very similar. We are both of us afraid that one does not like the other.
 
We are also different. We have different ways of presenting insecurity. My mother talks. I get quiet. Yesterday's conversation was the archetype of most of our talks. She spoke for roughly an hour. I spoke two or three times, for a rough total of four minutes.
 
We don't talk much so when we do I think she feels she must say everything. I find that that leaves me with little to say. I think this frustrates her. When she is frustrated she jumps from topic to topic. I couldn't recount yesterday's topics if I tried. I spent a long time trying and found I could do the list no justice. It would be my version of her list. It would be biased in my favor.
 
Some things she said that struck me such that I kept thinking about them well into the next morning:

• That the music I listen to is very sad and that by extension I seek out misery, as opposed to making an effort to be happy.

• That all my poems seem to be about gay things and being gay and why don't I write about something different—but actually it's fine that I am writing about those things right now. One day I will be older and will get it all out of me and then I will be able to write about other things.

• That I am a grown man and she can't make me do anything I don't want to do. It's just that there are certain things that she will not allow in her household. She is reticent as to what those things are.

• That if hypothetically speaking there was a cruise that she was going on with her sister and she could bring me as a guest on this cruise and her sister was bringing her teenage son-in-law and her sister told her that she did not feel comfortable exposing her son-in-law to 'that way of thinking' (i.e., my queerness) then she (my mother) would be morally obligated not to invite me since she has no right to interfere with the way that her sister wants to raise her child.

 
My mother cannot discuss my queerness without being awkward in a way that is painful for me to watch. Her face crinkles the way it does when someone says something confusing to her. Something confusing or something vulgar that she does not find funny. Her manner of speaking becomes slow. Drawn out. She seems to be choosing her words very carefully. She shrugs and makes other non-committal “I don't know” or “I'm not sure” gestures with her shoulders and hands. It is such a theatrical performance of discomfort that if I did not know her or if it did not concern me I would laugh at it.
 
Not only is she uncomfortable, she needs to let me know she is uncomfortable.
 
There are so many ways to approach thinking and writing about how all this is banal and insulting and hurtful. And I have gone through all those ways because this is my life and it is all I think and write about and I am tired of thinking and writing about it, but when I try to write about anything else I just end up writing about this again instead. And it is hard to make this poetic, it is hard to make this lyrical.
 
I find it hard to wrap my head around the concept of lyricism sometimes because the fact that something is beautifully put never actually changes what it is. This year has been a lesson in all the ways words fail me. When I need them to come they don't come. When they come they pour out unpolished and off-topic—a perpetuality of non-sequiturs and minor lyricisms that does nothing changes nothing teaches me nothing.
 
Many times during the conversation there were lulls where I could have interjected. My mother slows down sometimes, inserts a one or two or three second pause. Not a pause of total silence: she is mmm-ing or uhh-ing for her next word or train of thought. In these moments I understand that she wants to be interrupted. She is waiting for me to burst through the thin barrier of this interstice, this caesura; waiting for me to engage, cut in, show presence.
 
I recognize this from the rhythm of the conversations she has with my father or her brother or her sister or her father. A conversation in my family is a sort of formalized conflict dictated by a series of approved interruptions. She is waiting for me to stop her. I don't.
 
I want to see how long she will go on before she gets tired. I want to wait her out. The longer I stay quiet the faster and more frustrated her monologue becomes. I hope she will reach a breaking point, a moment where she confronts my silence in a direct way or even notices that I have not spoken. I hope that she asks me a question and gives me time to answer.
 
She doesn't. At least not for a while. Once we've passed the hour mark by about fifteen minutes she begins to slow. By now she has worked herself up to the point of crying and also worked herself back down to where she has recovered from it. I admire how strongly she feels her emotions. By contrast everything I feel is muted as if covered by a large weighted blanket.
 
Suddenly it happens. "Say something," she says. It is my turn to speak. This whole time I have been thinking of what to say. I have exhausted so many possibilities. I have run potential paths over and over. Dozens of scenarios. I have contemplated screaming, crying, comforting, arguing, whispering, joking, reading passages out of books or reciting poems, even just telling her my name.
 
I have contemplated a series of questions. Would you prefer it if I was straight? Would you accept me as a daughter? Would I be allowed to live here if I transitioned? Why do you keep referring to this as a conversation? I have not spoken yet. Not really. But you have called it a conversation five times. I counted. Would you really not take me on this hypothetical cruise? Will you read this essay when it's published? What will you think of it? Have you noticed the cats outside at all? Do you think of them? Why the fuck are you crying? Why can't you be like Jupiter's mom? When I told Jupiter's mom that my name is Sofi, she smiled so wide and said, "That's my daughter's name!" She has never called me anything else. And it's not that I want someone else as my mother, I don't know anything about Jupiter's mom, I've exchanged maybe three-hundred words with her in total. I dismiss this tangent in my head because it is unnecessarily detailed and distracting and confusing.
 
By the time it is my turn to speak I have had this conversation so many times in my head that I am tired of it. I am tired from not talking. I was trying to wait for her to get tired but I forgot that we work differently. She is energized by conversation, whereas I am drained by it. I don't want to be quiet but I also don't want to have to speak. And when I write I don't have to speak but I don't want to write about this. I want things to be different. I want to change something. I want. I don't know what I want. I want to do the impossible. I want to say the right words. I want us both to hear them. 

Sofi Ivy Ripley is a graduate of Florida International University, where she decided, after careful study and consideration, to become a lesbian. 

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