NAME
NAME MAGAZINE 2014
NAME Magazine seeks to encourage and support the creative writing community
at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief: Jamie Gugino
Graphic Designer: Emily Butler
Design Team Coordinator: Audrey Foppes
Design Team: Isaac Berger, Emma Fusco, Heather Cook, Victoria Louison,
Kendall Spaulding, Brian Windshitl
Editorial Team: Woogee Bae, Isaac Berger, Heather Cook, Chesley Coye,
Emma Fusco, Cheryl Johnson, Anne Mulrooney
Graduate Student Consultants
Joseph Hall
Veronica Wong
Faculty Advisor
Christina Milletti
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editors would like to thank the UB Department of English, in particular
Department Chair Graham Hammill, for supporting NAME as we’ve grown and
expanded. We would not be in publication at all without the support, guidance,
and inspiration of the creative writing faculty: Dimitri Anastasopoulous, Judith
Goldman, Myung Mi Kim, Karen Mac Cormack, and Christina Milletti. Emily
Butler, our graphic designer, deserves a very special thanks for her significant
work on the 2014 issue.
The editors also acknowledge and thank Jessica Smith, Matt Chambers,
Rebecca Stigge, and Chris Fritton, who founded NAME in 1998.
Contact us at [email protected]
Contents
04 ATHIRA UNNI
Fallujuah
06 AMIÉ ROMAN
Falling from Grace
07 CHERYL JOHNSON
Commodity(Fetishism)
Essentialism
08 DAMIAN PANTON
The Heart of a Living Thing
08 LISA GAGNON
Nothing to Lose
09 SUSHMITA GELDA
Sleepwalking
09 LEXI KATZ
Discovey
10 JAMIE GUGINO
Homage to Magritte
11 TARYN RUTKA
City Serenity
12 DAMIAN PANTON
Therapy
14 ADAM JOHNSON
Paris
16 HEATHER COOK
That’s All We Knew
17 An Expatriate Babe
18 OLIVIA PATICK
Pieces of Life
19 EMMA FUSCO
Samguise Wamgee
20 GEORGE MITCHELL
Missed Connection
21 Bank of America
22 ARIC ZAIR
Soul of Winter
22 AMANDA LEE JOWSEY
Inflated Ilusions
23 LUKE HEUSKIN
Visions
23 DANA HAVAS
Untitled
24 ANNE MULROONEY
The Day I Fell in Love with
My Pocket
25 The Eyelash Cottage
26 SCOTT HERMAN
Border
27 MICHELLE GASKIN
Tiptoe Through the Tulips
Sunflowers Applause
28 HENRY BROWN
The Slab
36 JAMIE GUGINO
Continuing the Divide
37 AMY GORSKI
Anxiety
38 ANNA DAVIDSON
The Light Unknown
41 MELISSA CHEN
Unspoken- A Spoken Poem
44 KELLY SCHUCKER
Negative
47 KENDALL SPAULDING
27 Heaven
48 CHASE CONATSER
A Conservationist’s Guide to
Wiping Your Ass
48 CALEB LAYTON
A Moth at the Window
49 ISAAC BERGER
Outreach
Stalemate
50 ALEX THAYER
The Lot
59 RACHEL PANEPINTO
Honest Goodbyes
60 CONTRIBUTOR
BIOGRAPHIES
FALLUJAH
ATHIRA UNNI
“America knows me as a number” 1
lined asphalt streets. the striped clown grins. smell of nuggets.
cashew-shaped brain cells, torturing my peace.
what am I? am I just a number?
Fallujah still bleeds. feet tattooed with her name,
vestiges of hope nested in Iraqi feet, the little girl’s feet
scattered ink with blood, torn tattoos and hopes 2
“will we reach home?” her brother had been grim. their feet would. her abaya 3 had just been a cloth,
before the world went deaf.
“terrible, terrible!”, beacon of freedom, world’s hope,
guardian-angel, Western might, the great God-complex
chains of shops, chains of hotels, chains of debts
binding this nation like a giant snake
green, you think it is. Karmic, maybe? You think not.
Fallujah still bleeds. whirring helicopters 4 ,
hovering low enough to make the houses tremble with hate,
to unsettle bodies and minds
and make the land permanently dizzy,
to give a puppet the crown, to settle ‘democracy’.
Sara Davy, private conversation, Red Jacket terrace, September, 2013.
part that is most likely to survive a bomb blast is human feet. Courtesy: “The
Long Walk- A Story of War and the Life that follows” by Brian Castner. People in this
poem tattoo their feet with their name and address in order to be recognized if found
dead.
3 abaya= Muslim veil.
4 “Collateral Murder” – a Wikileaks video of American air raids against Iraqi civilians
in Baghdad. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0).
1
2 The
04
the 19-year old soldier’s eyes are blue 5 .
he looks like he’d never smile. “I killed forty two.”
flicker of a question. shadow of doubt.
am I the puppet?
trembling hands, an imaginary rifle in his hands.
he bleeds daily like Fallujah.
Fallujah remembers.
bombs were baubles of an unreconciled war, a ‘noble’ cause, fought in fear of hate, of religion
of everything unknown misunderstood and left ignored
all that remains are the bullet holes on the clay walls,
unfilled, left alone, in a forgotten city,
a ghost town, dead. Long dead.
merry people, merry customs, lost in ignorance.
high on Hollywood, a mind-number.
exported sitcoms, imported brains; accused immigrants?
why love my neighbor? why care, “the price is worth it” 6
it’s freedom, people, don’t you see? it’s democracy established!
it’s peace for us and silence for the rest. deadly silence.
Remember Fallujah!
remember when screens spit venom and children die
when guns become rights and minds become numb
remember the eyes of the Iraqi girl
with tattooed feet who wanted to get back home…
and how her feet was all that remained. Kiss her feet.
Remember, remember Fallujah.
5 “Permission
to Engage”- a video with former U.S. soldier Ethan McCord
and the families of the Baghdad air raid victims. (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=YnF5X7xF8zc).
6 Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State, when asked about the deaths of
half a million Arab children.
05
FALLING FROM GRACE
AMIÉ ROMAN
Tap
Tap Tapping
And
Slapping
Of
Paper-Mache
Pointe-Shoes
On
The
Softly Squeaking Black Marley
T
Deep Breath, Focus
E
E
Back Straightens
T
A
Hips Centered
N
C
Left Leg, Toe Pointed
I
H
Ready To Lift All O
E
Of My Weight
P
R’
Onto Those 5 Toes
N
S INSTRUCTIONS: PIQUÉ TURN E
Listen Intently, Counting
As The Classical Music Crackles,
The Soft Chatter Of The Other Dancers
Restlessly Shifting In Black Chiffon Skirts,
Waiting, Waiting, Then Comes The: “5-6-7-8”
Left leg
Sings Out
Grabs
Body’s Weight
Right Leg Bends Inward
Toe Pointed And At Knee
Perfect,
Pivoting, Turning
Whooshing, But, Wait, AnkleTurning Wrong
Twisting,
Contorting
Top of foot
Lying On The Floor
Body Directionally
Wrong
For Ankle
Pain,
Pain, Pain
Why?
So Simple,
Just Spin!
But Now
On Floor
Lying On
Marley,
Ankle
C O
N
T
O
R
T
ED
Tripped En Pointe
06
COMMODITY(FETISHISM)
CHERYL JOHNSON
ESSENTIALISM
CHERYL JOHNSON
Essentialism
Mental am I?
Senile & mean
Nameless you would be
without me
Time eliminates
Assumption, you say.
An ass out of me?
But I attend Mass
Essential is the Utopian!
I spit & spat at you
Mate-less I am
An alien
07
THE HEART OF A LIVING THING
DAMIAN PANTON
The heart of a living thing
is a savagely reduced Decalogue
that beats loud and clear
then
faint
but always intermittent
as if voices overheard
on a windy street.
Blood seems an extraterrestrial vitamin
deflecting the crushingly filthy
noise of whispers through steel veins
animated with an insatiable rush,
engorged with a beguiling anguish.
A game of pleasure and desire
with rewards of humiliation and shame:
to recognize immediately
the mockery and self-deception
then understand the dignity
we have all struggled for.
NOTHING TO LOSE
LISA GAGNON
Why?
whispered fixings flip tipsy verses
sad cats extrapolate fascinating pastoral fallacies
feelings kneel before fearing tears
who play with brains not refraining from pain,
caught carrying caring calculating criminals
luminescence illuminates gloomy noodles
neurotransmitters necessitate palpitating hate
insinuating tidbits tiptoe to epithets
To help or to harm, is it that hard to choose?
talk knots, pop not taught for naught
broad fraud Freud flash flood pail flailing
receive neat feet teeming with meatballs
conditioning of classical catastrophes
ego must have something to prove or nothing to lose
Why?
08
SLEEPWALKING
SUSHMITA GELDA
Today we walk under sodium skies,
and listen to the evening’s fading cries.
we watch as
lamplight floods the river,
cold and wild,
it mesmerizes the eyes
of our inner child—
and all at once we see
the city,
a glimmering shawl
and feel the heat of life’s
withdrawal—
DISCOVERY
LEXI KATZ
Dancing with eternal duality
Shaded frequency of wonder
Spiral whorl of celestial cosmos
In rhythmic vibration
Twists of umber
Luminary light
Roll through space
Our souls in endless bliss
Glowing stars of shared eye
Boundless this tree
Beaming embrace
When barriers break
We are harmoniously
Nothing
No thing
At all
09
HOMAGE TO MAGRITTE
JAMIE GUGINO
*Winner of the Axelrod Memorial Award
Horizontal biomorphs a treecloud-wordpicture. Perfect precise image
angled through frames of speech in the lost world. Ghost or faceless
being? The invention of life land. That person lost their woman’s memory
in the shade. Spewing bubbles of written characters. Those six elements of
psychoanalogy. Inchoate impasto shadows. Quasi.... Masked. I see you from
behind your different. I can make you disappear, a symmetrical trick. Facade
de ciel. Diptych dipsticks disguised delightfully I dentically. The burning
Poe vanished in silence. The horse painted me fowl in the forét. Word is a
picture. Interpretative phantom of familiarity. The joke was a proposition,
verbally connected to the pipe. This is not Art. This is a piece of cheese, a
pipe, a key, a leaf, and a wine glass with tea. The mysterious proof is inside
papiers collés. Underneath the egg, but you can only crack it with a hammer
heated by a candle in a glass while dressed like a man wearing high heels.
Colouring a leafy landscape then printing, with numbers inserted by the
finger balancing balls and ringing horse bells. The pipe is an apple of
rainbow paint inscribed beautifully with the words “art of conversation”,
under the moonlight the cut-out spelling is a parody, a surreal revolution. A
ham-fisted, lost world of syllogism, dressed in a tribly hat- untitled. Le sens
propre is man-made. The tree of mirrors is in the sky.
10
CITY SERENITY
TARYN RUTKA
11
THERAPY
DAMIAN PANTON
Ascension (Part I)
A factitious shriek from the fluorescent red box roused you from sleep. Adverse to the dawn,
no stimulant could stifle contempt felt for those comfortably emotive before noon. An arm
and a watch, seasoned cosmopolitans, voyaged through an ocean of denizens harmonious in
a way that introverted everything else. A mass of tatters quivered as you walked past, God
bless you and may he forgive you of your sins. Suspended, momentarily, in anticipation of the
words that never came, you wished he hadn’t said anything.
Reclamation (Part II)
Recollection stretched from childhood to adulthood; infectious memories spread back to the
beginning of your life. You tried to tell me, as well as one could, what it was like being you.
Described a feeling you held of being misplaced, standing to the side of yourself, watching
while wondering if this was how everyone felt. Disassociation,
I supplied. For a
moment you felt fine, and then your head began pounding with the voices of revelation. You
should take the train home.
Disassociation (Part III)
A female face
formless but featured.
Partially hooded, verdant eyes
angelic and alluring.
Heavy lines divined her beauty
marred by hues of blue and pink.
Above:
“Beauty. Over. Time.
12
BASTION COSMETICS”
No one solves crime
on the silver-tipped wings
of thinly veiled eroticism.
Scopophilia:
Hermaphroditic women
all-repelling with their
attraction flung out
over an immensity;
brooding over their dark power.
In harmony with:
Justice (is societal):
Knowledge as
piercing divine light.
In conflict with:
Crime:
Knowledge as
the black of immoral streets.
In contact with:
Revenge (is personal):
Knowledge as
intimate, deformed power.
For all the deep nights
punctuated by restless inquiry,
these things have become nostalgic.
Lonely saxophone riffs
and the sparkle of
sex and violence
to mask a clash of:
Epistemes:
Knowledge as
systems from different moral orders.
Detectives don’t do
what we think they do.
13
AND PARIS WAS EMPTY
ADAM JOHNSON
And so, I awoke and Paris was empty, which was interesting
because I had never been to Paris before (I had once been to Lisbon but
that city is in a poorer country and Kanyé West has never written a song
about it, so attention is really quite fleeting about that pleasant decaying
city) and I wondered why it was that Paris was empty and why it was I
was alone in a Parisian hotel room when the night before I had laid my
head on a pillow in Boston or was it Tacoma, maybe Seattle but that really
doesn’t matter because America is one in the mind and that one is so full of
oneness that sometimes I vomit from overconsumption.
And so, I awoke and Paris was empty, the streets as vacant as the
Dead Sea and the café doors’ ajar in the morning’s pleasant autumn breeze
and the smell of lavender and cattle drifting through my shattered windows
with a directness one doesn’t often experience in ancient Europa and I
sat in the blueberry stained armchair and watched the emptiness of Paris
consume the vacancy of Bruges and the nothingness of Rome.
And so, I awoke and Paris was empty and the bed smelled like
Atlanta which is to say I couldn’t place the smell exactly, and the television
was on to an American news station with its colors and spectacle and
barking dogs, which meant that perhaps I was home, but no I was in the
Parisian snow and the bodies of the Gauls that Caesar had killed so many
centuries ago were playing rummy in the corner of the Frankish hotel room
on the Rue d’Aboukir which I couldn’t pronounce and really this is all about
me.
And so, I awoke and Paris was empty and the narrative was
collapsing under my narcissism and America’s girth and the night was over
and the day was gone too which left Paris in a perpetual fog of uncertainty,
the streets populated with the whispers of Parisian Jews whose bodies
were far away in the forests of East Germany and Poland, and the fog hung
until the sun returned from its vacation and brought with it the daylight of
European radiance to reveal Paris in all its grimy glory, a colossus sprawled
out along the silent Seine.
And so, I awoke and Paris was empty and London was empty and
Rome was empty and Berlin was empty and Madrid was empty and St.
14
Petersburg was empty and Stockholm was empty, but New York was full
and Tokyo was overcrowded and Mumbai pulsed with its neurosis and Sao
Paolo lit the night, all leading me to conclude that I was in Europe and not
the perverted results of Europe and its oh so European ways and the chairs
were in a circle around a map of Liberia which scared me because I was
in a Parisian hotel and I could have sworn the race to Africa was finished
years ago under the Saharan sun and among the Rhineland’s healthy trees
and down beneath London’s rubble.
And so, I awoke and Paris was empty, except for me and the
billions of history’s dead, milling in raucous cafes and silent theatres, all
telling their stories but no one taking the time to listen- but I tried to listen,
to the dirty Gaul and the burnt Huguenot and little Napoleon, and to the
incoming whispers on the breeze from lonely Belgium and distant Latvia
and I heard the distant shouts of my American brethren across the ocean
busy playing war among themselves, salting the earth with their fake blood
and soupy pesticides all in the name of liberty’s brother obliviousness, who
if I were to describe him would be a morbidly obese pheasant waiting for
his turn to run off the pretty cliff.
And so, I awoke and Paris was empty, but I wasn’t empty, I was full:
full of the stories and the lives and the experiences of a gone Europe and a
gone Asia and a gone Africa (but not a gone Australia) and the melodramas
of history seeping from my body like excess bacon grease and I called
out in the empty streets of dead Paris, called out my poetry and prose, all
for nothing, for no gain, for no point or goal or profit or motivation except
that I could, and I did, and I wanted to and I wanted to walk the streets of
Dante’s Europe in solitude, away from squealing America and cruel China
and obtuse Russia and contemplate the past, present and future all at once,
all together in the fading spring morning and so what if America reigns
supreme?, it lays supreme in the spectacle and the spectacle doesn’t exist
and America doesn’t exist and the terrorist doesn’t exist because he lives
in the spectacle and now as my thoughts disintegrate, I can hear the gates
of Hades open and release all my friends back onto the battle-scarred
landmass…
15
THAT’S ALL WE KNEW
HEATHER COOK
“Here’s ten dollars, buy a pizza,” Ma said.
A night of bingo dabbers and lucky charms
Spiraled from days to weeks to months
Stained yellow--from seasons in the bingo hall
Rubbing the Buddha and rabbit paws
Cocaine is a masked thief
Now we’re eating
Baked beans and cold raviolis
Scavengers
Dividing moth-ridden sweaters
Forgotten like the law
“Daddy’s in the war,” I said
“Smile back at the moon”
Memories murdered
Declaration dancing behind eight beady eyes
Can he hear our pleas?
Alteration
Eldest daughter to the new caretaker
As quiet as bruises come
Idle in darkness against the wall
The enemy pitter-patters
A flickering light becomes bait
To stomp on fast-moving cockroaches
The only game we knew
16
AN EXPATRIATE BABE
HEATHER COOK
the clever storm, the creeping shadows, the churning smog that smothers the peasant skinned
guards of the Queen’s castle barely treading River Thames:
this is the mist, the black smog that will put Daisy in a scandalous maze.
this is the thickest part of the phase.
the “jovial,” the redcoats, the Big Ben that grinds his gears to look away in attempts of
regurgitating swallowed time. clicks he cannot unwind and clicks he does not want to unwind to
watch it all again. he needs to forget the pink lipstick upon a pound of dirty flesh.
this is the thickest part of the phase.
the way she struts down Oxford Street, American patriotism in her stride; the way her polished
bags sway; the way her legs glisten under her umbrella beneath the sunny rainfall:
this is the reason why: justified deception. this is the redcoat atop her tiny frame in the maze,
that is the thickest part of the phase.
stained glass windows reflect and shed light on the silent bruises of the restless girl stuttering
her prayers; Westminster Abbey chimes every time she cries, and worship caresses her
as smooth as a mother wrapped in silk waiting to wipe away
the thickest part of the phase.
“listen to the chime, for the thinning of the thickest part of the phase”
17
PIECES OF LIFE
OLIVIA PATICK
Friendships
spoil
quicker than
humid
milk
Rancid
bites
send me
estranged
in parking lots
bittersweet
liberty
The empty echoes
keep me sane
Fast forward
moments
sunlight illuminates
our dead days
breathing
my languages
into
unmalleable ears
twenty pages
behind
my own
book
deviled
eyes
innocent playing
rips me to the core
stubborn and
defeated
she sits clasping
white whine
money
hungry
licked fingers
pull bills
pursed lips
cast yellow phlegm
waltzing smoke
in lungs
18
SAMGUISE WAMGEE
EMMA FUSCO
Samwise Gamgee watched the Beetles tribute on CSB
Samguise Wamgee listened to the Beetles play the Beatles
The Beatles played for their fiftieth anniversary
The other Beetles play for the Beatles sithtith anniversary
A plentiful handful of fulfilled pessimists started camaraderie in a
pristine Starwarsbucks in Liverpool
The pretentious teens turned to tweetle about the beetle that was
playing the Beatles, ready to live their Cambria life instead of Times
New Roman.
“JAI GU RU DAE VA”, John said.
“CHAI GOOD MOOD LATTE YA”, they heard.
OMMMM
John Lennon wept, not for the bastardization of his lyrics,
but for Yoko’s horrifying fashion sense.
19
MISSED CONNECTION
GEORGE MITCHELL
* Honorable Mention: Cook, Hammond, Logan Prize
CL > buffalo >personals > missed connections
Just a stranger being nice and thinking about someone else .
I have kept trying to reach out to you and then feeling it is futile yet I go and try again and again.
You were at Mercy Hospital today in the waiting room on the 3rd floor.
you were texting, but had this winery smile dripping from your face.
I really wanted to say hi, but got speechless.
Sometimes i dream that you’ll see me and you’ll agree that we can be, i dont know what we’d be.
I was just wishing that I could have made you smile, or cheered you up today,
or everyday for that matter.
Meeting someone decent is so hard now.
I wish you would have let me worship those feet of yours.
I’m not sure if your in to golden showers or just publicly peeing but email me!
Posting ID: 4062019877
Posted: 2013-10-5, 1:10AM EDT
20
BANK OF AMERICA
GEORGE MITCHELL
*Honorable Mention: Cook, Hammond, Logan Prize
Banking products are provided by Bank of America, which is divided
Into a number of affiliated banks, which are then divided into a number of ranks
All under the name of the Bank of America corporation, here in the U.S. nation.
Investing in securities involves risks, it’s easy to lose your money (tsk).
You should review any planned financial transactions before you take any action.
Merrill Lynch is the marketing name for Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, and they just might be able to
help you plan for your retirement.
Merrill Edge can you help you invest, and they also offer advice to businessmen who wear vests.
Securities products are provided by MLPF&S. (As an aside, we don’t condone insider trading, but if you do,
don’t leave any evidence.)
Insurance Products are offered through Merrill Lynch Life Agency Inc., which can be handy if you find
yourself on the brink.
Bank of America, N.A. Member FDIC. (As you can see.)
©2013 Bank of America Corporation. All rights reserved. All reserves are right.
21
SOUL OF WINTER
ARIC ZAIR
Soul of Winter
Among the ague of the ice and snow
Here in this arctic territory,
I find not darkness or sorrow,
instead I find peace
within the calming snowfall
Watch it drift softly to the ground.
The sun still shines,
yet far from this algor
This is my home
I seek not warmth,
for the refined chill soothes
It quiets the mind and soul
There is no need for grass of green,
skies of blue,
botany spreading across the terrain
Let them linger elsewhere
I profoundly enjoy it here
among the ague of the ice and snow
INFLATED ILLUSIONS
AMANDA LEE JOWSEY
Let the red balloons go,
the tokens of hope,
inflated by illusion
popped by the pull
of our familiar atmospheres.
The shells deflated,
their content settled and dispersed,
the breath knocked from our chests,
holding nothing more than a fist-full
of disenchantment and remorse.
22
VISIONS
LUKE HEUSKIN
I have seen the winter blowing in
on the factories and on the beaches,
death-bespeckled in fluorescent plastics
beneath the skyway on the fringe
of decay, where human squalor plants
its kiss on Earth, and she shudders.
What is this feel, this sense?
Can I shake from my nostrils this
heavy scent? It twists my gut, and
the gray wind pining with cold needles
blears my vision. The gulls wheel
for escape but they, like we, cannot leave.
The dome of the sky is high and like
unyielding granite. It traps us here
and here we feel the stale air of a
coming storm grow stale around us
like the weight of a choking, leaden palm
that will soon melt away the winter,
and come summer leave us cold again.
UNTITLED
DANA HAVAS
These hands,
which speak of seasons that never came
and of months that have passed all in the same
two syllables,
(hands that chopped the wood
that struck the match that lit the fire that raised the bread,
that these hands feed now to each other)
take a moment to recall
the sum of one and one.
23
THE DAY I FELL IN LOVE WITH MY POCKET
ANNE MULROONEY
He fluffs and sometimes ruffles, softly swaying when I sway.
Crinkling, sometimes tinkling, with my nickels for the day.
He jingles and he jangles, sounding cheerful and quite merry.
My quiet friend, my loyal friend, filled with all that he can carry.
One day I didn’t give him any change or stuff to hold,
I was walking down the street when all at once, lo and behold!
My friend, he started talking! There I heard him say, “Hello!”
‘Twas a whisper, just a whisper, but it set my heart aglow.
His voice was raw, but soft and gentle; kinda friendly, rough and tough.
I giggled and I wriggled and found my brain was full of fluff!
But I went ahead and asked him, “Should I have left my purse at home?
Perhaps you’re feeling empty, would you like my keys, my phone?”
“No! I’m just here for conversation,” he huskily replied.
So huskily, so muskily, his voice touched me deep inside.
“My pocket’s talking! This is shocking!” I was thinking at this time.
His handsome ‘hello’ was heavenly – a taste of the sublime!
So I found myself at ease and I began to chat nonstop,
Blabbering ‘bout my books and sister and my favorite coffee shop.
“How ‘bout you? What’s your life like? What’s your real name?” I ask at last.
He had only laughed and listened while I was spilling out my past.
He chortles and I blush. He says, “I don’t remember much;
I only know for certain I came alive at your first touch.”
I get so swoony and so moony and heaven knows I’m so in love.
His voice is deep, I’m swept off my feet, but there’s a problem here… sort of.
He’s so gentle, and sentimental, but he’s the stitching on my hip!
How’s a girl supposed to kiss a guy with threads instead of lips?
Pondering this loathsome problem, I stopped and listened to a sound:
The pocket on my hip began to beat; began to pound.
Steady, strong, I heard it pumping; starry eyed, I looked to see
My own true love and pocket had a heart, undoubtedly!
“Oh love of mine!” I cried aloud, “Let’s ride away together,
Into this summer sunset, and we’ll stay attached forever.”
24
THE EYELASH COTTAGE
ANNE MULROONEY
Spinning in a circle, incapable of
numbers, and all the milk-stars
mean more than language. Lungs
are sprouting fingers, tickling the rib
cage till its drunk, till it’s bleeding
scraps of poetry.
Stories by the light of seven rosy
candles. Kisses you on the nose,
writes a poem and dresses up like
princesses from Egypt, China,
India. Sings a lullaby for you and all
your freckles, braids your hair out the
attic window.
That stair there, this stair here, lead
up and down and back around again
right into my armchair. I made it from
a curtain. I made it from a blanket. I
made it from my nightgown. I made it
from my skin.
Furnished this house with wood and
lace and water. Leafy vines and tiny
sparrows. Brick
walkways and
whistling gardeners. Straw hats that
protect you from the sun. Old
books, dusty pages, this is for you.
25
BORDER
SCOTT HERMAN
B
o
We all agree on
R
E
�
D
e R
‫ﻝلﺍا‬
D
Does it exist?
‫כֵּן‬
R
‫"א‬
R
нет
Nein
o ‫ﻥنﻉعﻡم‬
�
B
Should it exist?
Index: � – North (Korean) � – South (Korean) ‫ – "א‬No (Hebrew)
ет – No (Russian) ‫ – ﻥنﻉعﻡم‬Yes (Arabic) ‫ ﻝلﺍا‬- No (Arabic) ‫ – כֵּן‬Yes (Hebrew)
26
TIPTOE THROUGH THE TULIPS
MICHELLE GASKIN
SUNFLOWERS APPLAUSE
MICHELLE GASKIN
27
THE SLAB
HENRY BROWN
I am awake, but I cannot see. I’m not sure how I realize that I have
crossed the line from the void of nothingness to my stark, pitch-black reality, but it
must be the cold. You never truly notice the cold when you’re sleeping, even if you
dream of dead splintered forests in the heart of winter or crushing darkness at the
bottom of the sea; for your brain cannot properly recreate, or even contemplate,
true and utter cold. It is an element purely of the body, devoid of the underhanded
shell games of the mind.
I think I am awake, but I cannot see, nor can I move an inch. I try to
breathe and my nostrils fill with powdery snow. I almost suffocate right then and
there. I blow as much back out as I can, but the rest clings to my gums and the
insides of my cheeks and down my throat like an adhesive. I open my mouth as
wide as possible and begin to twist my tongue around in every direction I can
reach, guiding tuft after tuft of snow into my mouth. Each mouthful takes a few
moments to melt, and with every passing second my panic grows: that primal
reaction that seizes your body when your lungs reach for air and find only water.
I know I don’t have long before I suffocate completely, but I am aware of myself,
of my situation, and I know that my own sense and reason are the only barriers
separating me from this horrid place becoming my frost-tomb.
But a pocket appears, the slightest bubble of oxygen, a shard of
precious life. I inhale lightly, knowing I have been blessed with only so much air.
It feels like I am breathing for the first time. It burns like dry ice, filling my lungs
like cement. I need to create a larger pocket. I need to free a hand. I try to move
my fingers but the snow has utterly compacted them, wrapped around them in a
tight embrace. I think that my right hand is up close to my head, but it only feels
that way. For all I know, I’m upside down. I am trapped, suspended in a frozen sea
of my own design, unable to rise to the surface or sink to the bottom.
I feel a shift somewhere around my right arm. I try to move, and some
snow begins to give way around my fingers. I continue to twist them in circular
motions, and soon I have created a second pocket, although my hand is not
completely free. I flex my fingers to the side, trying to discover the source
the disturbance. I brush against something, a canvas-like fabric. It is either an
abandoned pack or one of the others. I continue to brush against the fabric,
clearing away as much snow as I can. If it is a pack, perhaps it has an extra
beacon. If it is one of the others, perhaps they too are still alive.
My heart leaps when the thing I have found begins to react to my touch.
I twitch my fingers even faster, slowly uncovering more and more. It occurs to me
28
that I am feeling a disembodied elbow. Its owner is churning it slowly in slightly
circular motions, timidly creating space, and I help as much as I can. We dig
for a long time, his elbow and my fingers working together to free each other. I
suppose that it’s a small miracle that we landed right beside each other, close
enough to make contact. Of all the ways we could have ended up, such positioning
could mean our liberation, our salvation.
My friend’s elbow, having created enough space for itself, begins a
series of beating motions, trying to pound away at the last remaining snow that
keeps him from reaching out and grabbing my hand. It is still utterly dark, and
the cold has truly begun its assault. I can feel it sinking through my clothes,
slowly extinguishing any scant trace of warmth that still remained. Some more
compact snow collapses near my face, and even though I can’t see, I know that the
air bubbles that hold my hand and my head have connected, for I can hear my
friend moving his elbow more clearly. The width of the hole he’s creating grows
beyond my reach. He has freed his elbow even more, but not enough to pull his
hand through the hole between our air pockets. I rub my fingers against him and
can feel him still digging, attempting to free his face. I yearn to help my friend,
but there is nothing I can do but wait. I continue to brush my fingers against
his elbow, to let him know that he’s not alone. I wonder who it is. Through the
utterly embracing and dominating cold I sense the slightest glimpse of warmth
in his touch. I cling to it feebly like an infant runt to its mother. It is practically
nonexistent, but it is still there, a solitary beacon shimmering across the black and
icy gulf.
There is a gasp and a cough. My friend has finally freed his mouth and
he sputters and chokes away the snow, just as I did. He breathes quickly and
deeply, sucking in mouthful after mouthful of our precious air.
“Try to breathe lightly,” I say, “there’s only so much air in here.”
“Jack, is that you?” It’s Charlie, the youngest of our four-man group.
“Yea, it’s me. Are you OK, Charlie?” I say. He continues to cough. Even if
we did have some light, I wouldn’t be able to see him. I still can’t move my head.
But his head is only about two feet from mine. I can hear him though. His spastic
wheezing masks the panic in his voice.
“Yea, I think I’m all right. Ugh. My legs are numb,” the two of us can only
speak through rasped whispers. I try to feel my legs and realize I can’t. The cold
has already evolved into complete numbness around my knees.
“Me too,” I say.
“Jack,” Charlie says, “do you have a beacon?”
“No, your brother has it. I don’t even know if my pack is still on my back.
How much can you move, Charlie?”
“Barely, just my elbow. My hand’s still caught and I can’t fucking free it.”
29
I hear him give a tug and he lets out a dog-like yelp. “Oh God,” he whimpers, “I
think my other shoulder is dislocated or something.”
“Just try to relax,” I say, “Panicking won’t get us out of here.”
“I’m not panicking, I’m in fucking pain,” he says between a grunt and
a sob. I feel sorry for him. He’s only 22. This was supposed to be his first big
adventure.
“It’s gonna be OK, man. Can you move your head? Can you see
anything?”
There is a moment of silence, although it feels way longer.
“No, nothing. I’m sorry, Jack.”
“It’s alright, Charlie. Listen, if you can, I need you to try and free my
hand,” I wiggle my fingers as I say this, “I’m wearing a watch…It has a light.”
“OK, I’ll try.” I begin to feel his elbow rotating again, pressing downward
against my fingers. Slowly but surely, I start to feel the deeply compacted snow
smooth and clear away. I can wiggle my palm a little bit along with my fingers.
I begin to rotate my wrist as Charlie uncovers me inch by inch. It feels like I am
rediscovering my hand after years of paralysis. I can feel my icy blood rushing
and filling the newly freed muscles and flesh, pins and icicles piercing every
remaining, functioning nerve within. Before long I can rotate my whole hand, but
cannot fully bend it. I feel my watch rub along my wrist as it rises above the newly
formed powder.
The light emanating from my watch is green and very dim, but it is
enough. Crystals sparkle and reflect all around us. For a moment I imagine
with the remnant of a childhood fantasy that we have ventured deep into some
forgotten mine and struck gold, or more accurately diamonds; but these diamonds
are cut and polished, their jagged forms reflecting the gloomy beams of the
nearly nonexistent light source with artisanal beauty. In the faint light I notice for
the first time the frost gathering around my eyelids. They nearly blind me. I blink
spastically and they clear away. I crane my head to the right and see Charlie’s
elbow resting by my hand. His arrhythmic pants mingle with soft sobs, his head
bowed and shadowed through the foot wide hole between us.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” he says, “I can’t dig anymore right now. My
shoulder’s…giving out.”
“That’s alright,” I reply, “You’ve done enough. Just try to control your
breathing for the time being.”
“Jack,” my heart sinks as I hear in his voice the same primal fear that I
feel, “is help coming?”
“Shut up, Charlie…Obviously it’s coming,” but honestly I have no idea.
Charlie’s older brother, and my good friend, Joe, has the only beacon between
the four of us and he could be anywhere else on the mountain at this point. I can
30
only hope him and Tyler were able to make it out. At least then someone would
definitely be looking for us.
“Jack…”
“Yea.”
“Where did you go?”
I pause. “What do you mean?”
Charlie sighs. “Well, you were behind me, and we were going up. But
then I turned around to make sure you were still there…and you weren’t. Then it
all started happening. Where did you go?”
I don’t really know what to say. I can’t tell him completely. I don’t think I
can even say it to myself. “I went the wrong way.”
“Oh…”
“I know. Charlie, I…” I know what to say, but struggle with the words, my
own deluded pride still trying to survive in the glimmering cement-like snow, “I’m
so sorry.”
“It’s OK Jack…it’s…it’s not your fault,” Charlie manages to choke out. Not
my fault…
The silence is as oppressive and chilling as our current predicament.
Regardless, I remind myself that time is of the essence. If we can’t make more
air quickly then we are going to run out very soon. I shine my watch towards the
ceiling only inches above my head. It looks different in color from the rest of the
snow around us, a deep ethereal blue. Perhaps it can be broken.
“Charlie,” I say.
“Yea?”
“I don’t mean to sound pushy,” I speak to him very calmly, “and I know
this is a very bad situation but we need to concentrate and work together if we
want to get out of this as quickly as possible.”
I say “as quickly as possible” even though I mean “at all.”
“Ok,” he replies.
“Can you reach above you, Charlie? I need you to try and dig up with
your elbow and see if you can scrape away at the ceiling.”
“I don’t know if I can, Jack.” Blood shoots into my head in a spike of rage
and panic, which ironically sends shivers down my spine. But I force myself to
remain calm. If I lose it, then he will lose it, then we will die.
“Think about it, Charlie,” I say, trying to remain calm with him, “We
could be two inches away from the surface, but we won’t know unless you do
something. C’mon, man. I know you can do this,” I reassure him, try to comfort him,
but in reality I’m silently begging.
“Alright, Jack. I have…to try, right?” he chuckles through the pain and
the cold. He groans as he raises his elbow up once again. I watch as he brushes it
31
against the pillowed ceiling, slowly scraping away the looser snow. I realize with
a twitch in my cheek that this place is beautiful. What the fuck am I thinking? I
feel lightheaded, floating. Perhaps the hypothermia has already commenced my
descent.
Suddenly there is a deafening crack and a crunch, and ceiling shifts
above us. The whole thing actually drops a few inches towards us before coming
to a halt as abrupt as its fall. I feel the pressure of the air multiply, pressing in
around my exposed cheeks. Charlie shouts. I can hear the shock and horror in
his feeble voice. I feel totally paralyzed again. More loose snow drops down and
covers us, but we shake it off. Darting the frost from our eyes, we gaze up at the
massive slab of ice suspended only a few inches above our heads.
“Oh my God,” Charlie mutters, “It’s going to crush us.” He starts to
hyperventilate.
“No it’s not,” I say, “We just need…to stay still.”
“How are they going to find us, though? We’re trapped under this thing.
It’s…it’s trapped us in!” his panic is contagious.
“Charlie, please…calm down,” I can only manage a whisper. I begin
to feel lightheaded as the pressure closes in more and more around us. It seems
as though with every hyperventilated gasp Charlie takes, he is stealing more air
from my own lungs, and each breath becomes shorter than the one before it. Panic
clashes with delirium, and I can hardly hear myself speaking.
“Charlie,” I say, every word I speak is its own trial, “you have to…relax…
control… your breathing…you’re…using up…all…our air,” but Charlie does not
respond. I can hear him struggling more and more for breath, and he collapses
into a series of coughing and choking. I try to speak, but nothing comes out.
Through his suffocating pain I think I make out two words, or perhaps it’s my own
conscience trying to speak to me, “your…fault…”
I can feel myself drifting, and as everything turns cloudy all I can do is
look up at the icy blue slab hanging over my head. I truly can’t believe what I am
seeing. Of all the places where we could have ended up, we land beneath this, our
veritable tombstone. Its blue is blotched in places by an engrossing black. I stare
into the darkest patch, which sits directly above me, like a black hole pulling me
closer and closer. It would love nothing more than to devour me. I guess I deserve
it. I stare into the slab, and the slab stares back. It is our downfall, the instrument
of our disaster, floating above us, mocking us, mocking me, threatening at
any moment to make the final plunge and destroy us, just as it ravaged the
mountainside. As I drift even further from Charlie, the slab, and myself, I reflect on
how we came to be trapped there.
It really was my fault, despite Charlie’s words. I remember each of
32
Joe, Tyler, Charlie, and myself stepping out one by one and grabbing our skis,
which were leaning next to the wall of my cabin. I looked up through the dead
and gently swaying trees to the snow-topped peaks of Mount Nemesis, Montana,
and as I did, I felt my barriers of caution melting away into pure untempered
excitement. It was for Charlie’s sake that we went on this trip, for it was always his
dream to challenge the slopes of a mountain of such extreme caliber. Of course,
we were all more than happy to oblige him, and I arranged the whole trip. I urged
us up to the mountain this morning, despite the high-level avalanche warnings.
They were careful, and I was not.
I remember when we reached midway up the slope where the trees
began to scatter and diminish, replaced by layers upon layers of rocky cliffs that
varied in size as we went farther up. We rose higher and higher, and soon came
upon a massive slope that left us speechless. It was marvelous, beautiful, simply
breathtaking. For hundreds of meters up and around the snow lay perfect and
pristine, shining in the sunlight, perfect and seemingly virginal to the corrosive
presence of man. The four of us looked to each other and we silently agreed that
this is what we had come all this way for, as if the mountain had created it for us
and us only.
I remember when we worked our way to the top. Joe suggested leading
our band off to the right, while I suggested the left. The left looked like more of
a challenge. If we came all the way up here, why would we not take the greatest
challenge this mountain has to offer? I believe those were my exact words. Joe
looked down at my suggested route and replied, “Because it doesn’t look safe.” He
was keeping Charlie in mind, and I respected that. It still felt like a waste, though.
We took Joe’s lead, and Tyler followed behind him, who was followed
by Charlie, and I took the end of the line. Joe led us down carefully enough, but
my own thrill seeking made me restless, waiting at the back for Charlie to keep
up with the others. I knew I had to stay behind him. It was my duty to watch out for
him. But as we gently glided down the slope, I looked off to the left. Farther down
I could see a crest in the snow that rose upwards and then dropped about twenty
feet, creating a perfect ramp. It was like it was made for me, waiting all this time.
It was just too perfect. I knew I had a duty to watch over Charlie and the others,
to make sure we all stayed together and were safe. Nevertheless, my own desire
overpowered me, and I threw caution to the wind. I veered away from my friends
and made for the ramp, and challenged the mountain’s wrath.
I understand now why I felt that ramp was made for me. It was a trap.
I felt the blue ice shift as I passed over it. There was a slight initial give before it
cracked under my feet, and suddenly the silent white slope that we had gazed
upon with reverence just moments before burst into a frenzy of chaotic life. The
dislodged slab of ice, the feeble stick holding up this colossal force of nature,
33
the stick that I broke, slid beneath my feet and flung me forward. I miraculously
landed on my skis and I just kept going. The mountain roared behind me, inciting
a primal fear that I have never felt before. I didn’t dare look back. There was no
doubt my friends were already swallowed by the avalanche raging above me. I
knew fleeing was ultimately pointless, and I stayed ahead for only a few moments
before I was overrun. Clouds of snow burst forth like an atomic explosion, racing
past and around me at a seemingly unnatural speed, frozen hordes of the deepest
circle of hell, cascading back to their kingdom of damnation from their failure
to claim the heavens. There was a moment before the great and final deafening
plunge when I was lifted up over the snow and I rode atop the demons, unable
to control the ceaseless cascade from collapsing upon itself at the bottom of
the mountain. As trees reappeared and flew by me like wisps of rain across a
windshield, the avalanche sucked me down again, and I was rolling, twisting and
turning through never-ending oblivion. Then there was darkness, silence, and
nothing.
I must have passed out, possibly from the change in pressure and
lack of air. I can hardly breathe anymore. I look at my watch and realize that in
my initial panic I foolishly forgot to check the time, so I have no idea how long
I was unconscious, but it has been hours since we first started up the mountain.
Somewhere above us, it will be growing dark soon. I cannot completely clear
my vision. The frost has once again congregated around my eyes like lead to a
magnet. I try to call out to Charlie, but not even air escapes me.
There is no air, or it is virtually gone, and I am slowly choking. I can only
see blue through the blur. As my vision slightly returns I realize that the slab is
less than a mere two inches from my face. It has closed in silently, like a sea-beast
hidden beneath the waves, circling its injured, helpless game. I turn my head
as much as I can and see Charlie’s elbow and the shadow of his head, bent and
crooked, motionless. The slab of ice has bent down at an angle in his direction. It
is pressing down on his head. Was he calling for me? Was he screaming for help
as the slab came down on him? Was it a quick drop or was it a slow and torturous
descent? I brush my hand against his elbow, trying to provoke him, to let him
know I am still alive. I search desperately for the warmth I felt from him before, but
it’s gone. My only company is the cold now, and this godforsaken slab.
I look up. As my vision diminishes and I cling to my final traces of
consciousness, it appears as though the black blotches in the blue form together
to make a ghastly, jagged face, grinning malevolently down at me. I submit. I give
up. The conquerors have been conquered, so to speak. Just as my will fades, the
cold falls away, and like me, becomes nothing; and with nothing left to do, I fall
into its embrace. It takes me in gladly, like a parent joyously accepting the return
34
of their lost runaway child. There is no such thing as cold now. It’s relaxing actually,
peaceful, even warm.
The slab shifts slightly, pressing us deeper into its hold. I don’t look at it
with loathing or guilt anymore, only with vicarious curiosity. I think I can see my
face within it, inching closer and closer. I had attempted to overpower its brutal
nature, but now it has pinned me down for the final count. It shifts again. Maybe
there are people walking on it above me. Maybe Joe and Tyler are up there,
having somehow located us. Maybe they are trying to break through the ice, and
in moments I will be saved; or perhaps it is just another shift in the snow, another
victorious jest of our captor. There’s no one up there, and even if there was, it
would take more than a few moments to break through the slab and reach me, and
moments are all I have left now. In fact, I think I’m already gone.
35
CONTINUING THE DIVIDE
JAMIE GUGINO
36
ANXIETY
AMY GORSKI
I tell myself to breathe.
Just.
It’s hot enough I think my brain will explode.
I worry I might die. I worry,
that this is the only way to make the madness end.
Breathe.
I count the numbers,
over and over
thinking that I can will my throat to open.
For air to rush in and not taste like acid
on my lungs
I inhale.
And choke on the tightness in my throat.
I want to calm down
I want to think straight.
Exhale.
The rocks are piling up in the small
dark room.
First the floor
then my back.
Covering me.
Crushing me with their responsibilities.
My body gives out like clockwork
every time.
My hands try to hold myself together.
But it’s too late,
I am already falling apart.
Melting.
My heart beats like an angry drum.
My ears are pounding.
My skin is turning red.
I take a breath.
My body strangles the air
refusing every molecule of oxygen.
My shivering is the only reminder that I am alive.
Existing.
With these red blurry eyes
and raw, scratched skin,
and sealed tight throat.
Telling myself over and over, to just
Breathe.
I can tell myself it will be okay.
It will be okay.
It will be okay.
It will. Be. Okay.
You can handle this.
But it seems (Inhale)
too (Inhale)
hard.
(Exhale)
I can hear the blood beneath my skin.
37
THE LIGHT UNKNOWN
ANNA DAVIDSON
(A cut-up poem of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus with Theodore Roosevelt and
William McKinley’s last words)
oh, dear
please put out the light unknown.
to the infernal darkness
never know
the end
space and time without depth
deserted, silent empire
the price that must be paid
for the passions
stronger than his rock.
melancholy arises in man’s heart
because its hero is conscious
that is
he is
a face that toils so close
to stones is
long effort
the a b s u r d hero
enough to fill
a man’s heart.
superior to his fate
his tragedy begins
write a manual of happiness
he knows
liberated Death
crushing truths perish
he stole their secrets
38
ceaselessly rolling a
rock
happiness becomes too insistent
too tightly to memory
already stone itself
condemned
grief is too heavy to bear
torment
the rock is still rolling
from being acknowledged
the sorrow was in the beginning
images of earth cling
measured by skyless
nights of Gethsemane.
the wild and limited
universe of man
the hour of consciousness
the lairs of the gods
suddenly restored to its
silence
settled among men.
inevitable and despicable
master of his days
the rock is still rolling
myth is tragic
performed in sorrow
When the
when the call of,
it happens:
surmounted by scorn.
absurd springs from happiness
the rock is still rolling
from the moment
fate that can not be
The boundless
two sons of the same earth
39
echoes in
Inseparable
makes of fate a human matter
futile suffering
this is the rock itself
the myriad wondering little voices
of the earth
rise up
this is the victory,
Happiness and the absurd
drives out of this world a god
struggle itself toward the heights
which must be
the universe
please put out the light unknown.
oh, dear
the rock is still rolling
one always finds one’s burden again.
Sealed by his death
he will never know the end
40
UNSPOKEN-A SPOKEN POEM
MELISSA CHEN
Allow me to tell you about desolate pathways that I’ve drifted over since birth it feels
like,
about all the staples I found strewn in an abandoned vineyard
from people trying to put themselves back together
as if we were rotting pieces of flesh hanging like winged hammocks from our rib cages
clasped too tightly around the motherboard of our still beating hearts;
And I’ll tell you about people who have long forgotten that
we aren’t paper-thin
and that’s why
staples, no matter how big or how small or how strong that industrial-sized stapler is
that
it can’t pin this – and by this I mean me – back together into original or mint condition
even if I had a lifetime supply of them.
I’ll tell you that to tell you of history is so difficult because
sometimes it’s easy to forget that our lives can’t be contained by words –
and that every letter burned into my retinas while I was reading glossaries and
dictionaries
written by obscure dead white men from decades and centuries ago
are from directories that are never going to be enough to describe emotions that I’ve
always been too afraid to admit to having or that
I often have dreams that could never come into true existence even if I poured asphalt
on them to make them concrete enough
to be tattooed across my skin so that God’s eyes would graze upon them if ever He were
to be bored and looking down on Earth one day.
Remember: that Shakespeare was so unsatisfied with the plethora of linguistic
accessories that was already available to him in the vernacular that he invented more
words and more terms nonchalantly,
and though I am no craftsman,
I believe that every human being has the innate ability to create
from sequencing these aching lines that squiggle and swim and begged to be used
across blank pages.
and that when I first really envisioned them in my mind, it was because
I needed them so desperately that night when I was homesick for the womb and so I
cradled myself in a fetal position while lying in bed because
they never tell you that it’s a scary world out there until it’s too late and you have to
constantly force a smile on your face because you’re so socialized to internalize that
you’re never fragmented enough not to project a semblance of being
whole.
41
They also never tell you,
though I think it can’t be taught –
that words, no matter how delicate or beautiful or strong or bold or where you
find or discover them,
can’t grasp the lack of syllables in nuances and poignancies that stir humankind
so vigorously
that we have moments where we can do nothing but howl so sharply from our
rooftops such that the sound waves travel and cut into the foundations of cliffs
bordering faraway seas,
and that eventually
the structure crumbles
much like the cookie.
And there are nameless words stuck inside my head that can’t be pronounced
by any tongue of maneuverable aptitude even if I brought Shakespeare himself
back to life,
that can’t be smushed or collected unto sheets, condensed into pages –
words
that can only be spelled out with air
circulating and encompassing us, but able to seen by none.
Life, I learned unknowingly,
or perhaps it was already part of an almanac coded into my DNA long before I
was ever conceived –
is a series of experiences and the condolences that arrive afterwards:
the I’m sorry that you’re bearing so much weight across your back, but hold me
now as I hold you because I guess I am being wedged open and breaking from
burden too.
and that life
is comprised of these almost lyrical compositions of little moments
that no matter how solid or vibrantly vivid that they are or that you think they are
– are always
always fleeting.
and I’ve transcribed into post-it scribbles many, many times, and never in the
same way twice,
because I guess
the suffering of being alive is all too artistic to ever stay constant, that:
Life is a trajectory, a sad conjecture of inability and missed opportunities
being thrown out of splintered windows that broke on a stormy Sunday when I
announced that I was in love way past the due date.
and people always get over things,
as if things were mountains that were to be climbed, or valleys to be crossed
and I guess I am always acclimating and inuring myself to new things and old
things,
42
but I can never quite adapt to anything because I haven’t lived fully enough to die
yet after passing on my genetics in a frenzy of procreation with deviled eggs, so
that the next generation born will have these lessons that have been branded unto
me before I was ever truly ready.
And allow me to tell you about the roses that I left lying on a grave that doesn’t
exist,
to honor the genesis of nostalgias and memories I bought and the watch I never
wore on my wrist
to remind myself
that nothing really is
except that
time is always
always lost and losing, and thus
never returned.
It’s just that how fast or how slow that it seeps out of our hands
depends on who you are, I guess.
so I’ve stopped counting the individual grains in this hourglass hoping I’ll know
when there’ll be nothing left to calculate,
because all I’ve ever done is waste time by biding it.
43
NEGATIVE
KELLY SCHUCKER
“You’re so small! Do you even eat?” they say, a chorus of voices: men, women, all ages, races,
of all relations to me. I do not respond but for the requisite smile, all politeness and dimples.
Boys are people measured in skill, strength, intelligence, potential.
Girls are shadows measured by how greatly we are filled by nothingness. By the space that
we don’t take up. We exist in the negative.
44
It is meant to be a compliment. When they say things like, “You’re such a little thing.” It is
a compliment. The men say this with a semi-mesmerized tone, measuring me sexually in
comparison to themselves. The women speak with reverence, worry, jealousy simultaneously.
I am absence. Outlines. Hollowness. The tracing of a girl. A mere silhouette.
Women are observed. We are a complicated math equation. Add jewelry, hair colors and face
paint. And subtract from the body. Make the physical presence as slight as possible. Learn the
art of invisibility.
Before all and above all, I am a body. More importantly, this body has been made as small as
possible. As disregardable as possible. You can nearly see right through me. All hipbones and
eyes.
They direct for us to be delicate like flower petals in spring or like snowflakes on eyelashes.
They call us hun and darling. We curtsy, lips pressed into a straight line.
45
Use small words: divide your vocabulary until everything is monosyllabic and only speak
in half statements when spoken to. Begin every statement with “sorry.”
use only lowercase. you have not been privileged to use caps lock. keep your voice
low. don’t articulate radical and unfounded opinions like equal rights and privilege and
feminism.
this is a process of silencing. we live as static, abstract shadows in a world of color.
“the inferiority of women is man-made” but shhhhh don’t speak too loudly.
subject.
object.
when we speak all you hear is small tongues on soft lips.
we are shadows.
we live in whispers.
this is the speed of suicide.
46
27 HEAVEN
KENDALL SPAULDING
I got high,
with you
last night.
(in my fantasies)
It was nineteen
sixty
nine
and I was yours
in the sky. And
if you’re lonely,
we could get down,
we could die.
//Shock me with your Electric Lady Heat//
while he keeps time with our
heartbeats.
I think she’s into me,
I said I think she’s into me.
I could sing for infinity:
“Don’t break my heart,
before this revolution starts.”
Because all that you’ve given –
I can open my eyes
to this Paradise.
Imaginary love,
somewhere in the crowd,
I keep you in my dreams.
When we were rock gods,
in the club of Kings and Queens.
47
A CONSERVATIONIST’S GUIDE TO WIPING YOUR ASS
CHASE CONATSER
*Winner of the Cook, Hammond, Logan Prize (excerpt)
The inner cloister,
The place where two bare freshmen might still feel awkward
Not having shared these visions or sounds or touches with another,
Is sacred ground.
Maybe the last
Where private lies so easily in the folds of its bearer.
Now sing from the vale a song so pure,
That could rise the depths.
That would wash through the halls.
Would bring what’s holy, the oppressed to light.
And over doormats of our neighbors,
Would pile the lost hymns of lovers.
A MOTH AT THE WINDOW
CALEB LAYTON
A moth bounced on the window pane
Pushing like the dead toward the light
And on the other side we bounced about
And wasted away the night
Later, I invited the moth in
And we philosophized together
He said, “Dear lord this life is wonderful!”
I said “Dear lord it could be better.”
48
OUTREACH
ISAAC BERGER
Closed eyes comfort brittle bones
Better off alone
In bed below broken windows
Tears stain sheets
Call the police
Please leave
STALEMATE
ISAAC BERGER
I could bear no load
Climbing the road
Motor engines crushed my bones
Still I went on
I saw the eagle’s windswept wings flown
The purple sunset shone
Imagining I saw past the dawn
I swore to keep my oath
At the pinnacle she posed
Above dirty hands laboring rote
I asked her for a song
She spoke not a note
49
THE LOT
ALEX THAYER
*Winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize for Fiction
At what seemed like well past midnight, rain began to clatter away at the
wavering tin roof above my head. In the parking lot, stuck dead in the middle of an
ocean of uninhabited cars, my purpose was simple: take the ticket, take the money,
watch for intruders. I was a vehicular mason, building a grid like structure of cars that
stretched from the center of the lot to the grass at the curb. Now I realize that I wasn’t
building anything at all. The lot was simply a concrete garden of ghosts. One that I
didn’t know how to leave.
I was living with my mother at the time, eating once a day at some old
burger joint down the street. Neither of us had any money, but the lot changed of all
that. I came to enjoy this kind of struggle, never knowing if the lights would be on
when I got back home. It was a game that we would somehow always win. Years later
the burger shack would burn down, leaving a pile of greasy soot for the rats to play in.
I still can’t walk by it without wanting a soggy bite of meat.
My mother had blonde hair and sang at church. When I was a boy she would
stand up with the rest of the group and bellow out hymns like it was the last thing she
fully understood how to do. I used to sit and watch her. Sit right on by while she gave
everything to something that I couldn’t believe in. I learned how to pretend there, in
that maze of wooden benches.
”Where is your mother?” people used to ask me while she waited in line for
communion. ”Why aren’t you with her?”
In the lot you’d have no choice but to pretend. Nothing around you had ever
lived.
My father had left years earlier when I was boy, dragging a pile of
irreconcilable memories in a suitcase at his side. I pictured them falling from every
leathery crevice, leaving noiseless impacts in the concrete as he moved down the
sidewalk and onto a bus to someplace else. The day before he went away he had told
me that it felt good to be dismissed like he was. He made it seem like my mother and
I were the ones putting him out, relieving him from his only duty as a man, a father, my
father. “I’m leaving because of you, son,” he said. To this day, I still can’t say whether
he was lying or not.
The lights were so bright in the lot that you couldn’t sleep, not even during
the dead of night. It was like swimming through moss. I wrote my mother nearly every
50
day while I sat—countless letters that she would never read. She was months into
her stay at the hospital by then. Visiting her was nearly impossible. She was barely
conscious half of the time, swaddled like a child in the baby blue spots of her hospital
gown, spots that embroidered an insignia of failing health across her chest. I had to
leave the room when she ate. It disgusted me in a way, how the nurse would come in
and change that viscous sack of food that dangled above my mother’s bedside, never
speaking a word. She knew that there was nothing left to say, that it was only a matter
of time. Eventually, there was no need for me to check in at the hospital anymore. She
was gone.
As my mother gradually died in front of me, she had come to take a more
perfect form of herself. I began to remember the little things that she had done—the
trips to the movies, the birthday parties, the dinners that she slaved over while my
father brooded on the living room sofa. Unlike her, he became a caricature of himself
as I got older, a joke that I couldn’t force myself to laugh at. He turned into someone
that I didn’t know, leaving only the falsest of imprints on my childhood memories.
I made the unconscious decision that he wasn’t mine, that he couldn’t be mine. I
remember my mother whispering loudly at him from the living room one night, as
if she were scratching something out of the back of her throat. She would poke and
prod his psyche, test his will in a way that only she could. And suddenly, he couldn’t
pass her tests anymore. There were nights when he would leave and not come back
until the next evening, and others when he would leave and be gone for days. He
inched himself further and further out of the door, and its frame seemed to shrink
each and every time. It must have been that one day the door was just too small.
It was March—the very beginning of spring—and the rats were out. They
came in droves some days. Dormant in the sewers, dead on the streets. Either
way, they loved the lot. A critic in my own personal gallery, I focused on the color
gradients that their fluids would form above the asphalt. The gallery of guts. I
imagined spectators lined down the sidewalk for blocks, heads gazing at shoes in
utter disbelief, utter provocation, utter emersion. And every day was a different show.
Of course, I saw cars crush live rats. I distinctly remember a big old truck
smashing one once, separating its pieces into a sinister, liquid puzzle. And the owner
got out of his car yelling at me like it was my fault. “Aw, coffee breath!” he kept going
on, pulling punches on curse words like he had kids to teach. “Whatcha doin’ just
standin’ there!? Get off yer ants and do somethin’!” I ignored him at the time, just like
I would have ignored anybody else. “Another piece for the gallery,” I said, but the
51
man didn’t hear me.
Later on I learned that the yelling man did have a child to teach—a boy. I
remember the man’s son wandering over to my hut one evening. His father was busy
at the pawnshop across the road, negotiating a new purchase, I assumed. The boy
reminded me of myself. The self that I would mold from the sooty remains of my now
defunct family.
The biggest rat I’ve ever seen wandered through the lot not soon before
that incident. Right down the middle of it, right by my little shack. He lurched across
the lot like he owned the place. King Rat was what I called him, and quite a king he
was. Looking at this beast was like looking at a massive building for the first time. His
big orange eyes shrieked through the night air, and he had a scar about the size of a
quarter above his left leg. I assumed that King Rat had been shot at one point in the
distant past—shot and survived. He was such a vile and disgusting rat that I would
often see him crushing the heads of ordinary rats and devouring them in two massive
bites, his oversized jaws sneering in a fierce display of pleasure. Eventually it almost
seemed that the rat population was selecting members of its kind to sacrifice to King
Rat. Keep the King fed and he’ll leave us all alone. That’s how we’ll survive.
In the lot, King Rat was a car born in a rat’s body. A poor old woman once
thought King Rat was a cat. I tried to tell her that he wasn’t at all, but she just walked
right up to him like she was going to pick him up and hold him in her arms—take him
home like a regular old pet. You can’t domesticate a rat though. They eat everything.
Shit everywhere. All they do is eat and shit until there’s nothing left. And when they
die there’s always more to take their place. King Rat was different though. There
wouldn’t be a rat to take his place. When the woman got close enough to see him all I
heard were screams.
One thing about King Rat, though, was that he wasn’t invincible to cars.
He ran away from them like all the others. Sunk into a large crevice in the black or
darted off beneath a sea of dormant engines. Many of the lot’s patrons had stopped
parking there because of him, not knowing that he would avoid them entirely if their
vehicles moved even so much as an inch. They were afraid that he would gnaw away
at the rubber on their wheels, or sever their brake lines in a fit of midday hunger.
They had no idea that King Rat was a wonder, the one and only thing that made the
lot different from any other. The yelling man, the owner of the pawnshop with the boy,
however, never stopped coming back.
When the yelling man brought his son to the pawnshop the boy would
somehow always find himself wandering over to me from across the road. We
52
exchanged very little words. All he did was stand there, adjusting the bright blue
baseball cap that he always wore. It seemed, over time, that the boy had many of
these habits. When the snow began to fall he would lob a tightly packed ball of white
against the side of my shack to let me know that he was coming. When it rained he
would stare up at the sky to examine the clouds, hoping that they would part so he
could admire the sun. I never asked the boy for his name, although I regret this now.
I must have figured I didn’t need it, in the same way that my father thought he didn’t
need me.
Above all, we shared a unique synergy—the boy and myself. I could see
his life unfolding before me, the ways in which it might end up mimicking my own. At
the time I guessed that he had known this all along. That the yelling man’s shouts had
been enough to pound an eventual collapse into his adolescent skull. I envied the
boy’s present, which is now my past.
Without the boy there wasn’t a thing that could keep my thoughts from
pouring out of some vacant cavity in my head and onto the asphalt. Being there could
transform my intellect into some gross abstraction of itself, in the worst of times. I
waded waste deep in the boy’s juvenile innocence. He didn’t see the lot as a tract
of land for cars. He saw it as a sheer forest, or gurgling spring. One that he could
wander to his imagination’s content with no consequence but his own.
When the boy saw King Rat for the first time, he wasn’t frightened. He
simply twiddled at the brim of his hat, wondering what exactly it was that he was
seeing. It seemed that the boy had found it strange that this creature thrived here,
completely unharmed. After his hands left his hat they slunk down towards his sides
and into his pockets. I wondered if the boy had wanted to go up and pet King Rat, but
as I looked over at him he began to walk away, further into the lot. I started after the
boy with urgency, and as I caught up with him, finally grasping at his shoulder, he
glanced up at me.
“You should build him a house.”
I didn’t take the boy seriously at first, but steadily his concern for King Rat’s
life became my own. I decided I would build King Rat a shelter—or rather, a palace.
At the end of the day I went to the lumberyard and came back with a stack of two by
fours. I threw them next to my shed when I got in to work the next morning.
That same morning, I remember the lot being exceptionally cold. It was
mid November. The place must have had ice running through its yellow veins. King
Rat was nowhere to be found, so I set myself to work. My first order of business
was picking the palace’s location. It couldn’t be too close to my shack, drawing the
53
attention of patrons, but rather nearer to the center of the lot. King Rat would need
equal access to all of its parts if it were to be ruled justly. I looked for some kind of
slope to build on, one that would plateau above the rest of King Rat’s kingdom. King
Rat, of course, would want an elevated view of his kind. I didn’t find a thing of this
sort. King Rat would have to be a rat amongst other rats, crushing their heads and
eating them as he saw fit. I assumed that he wouldn’t have a problem with that.
After walking the perimeter of the lot I decided on a small patch of dirt
close to the tip of its northwestern most corner. The lights hung low here. King Rat
would be able to stew in the darkness of this position—make himself at home. It was
a pitiless place. Felt like I could stick a sign into the mud that read HERE DWELLS
KING RAT, RULER OF RATS. The future palace grounds held the same sense of
desolation and longing as any other patch of dirt or gravel on the lot. This crater-like
homestead, however, was special. It was King Rat’s personal parking space.
The lot is a sea of infertility. Nothing that grows stays for long. Weeds shrivel and die.
Rats peer through cracks and dissolve—piles of naked, disjointed matter. Life just
vanishes in the lot, like it has learned to willingly drown itself—a perfectly docile
natural disaster. If you stand still long enough in the lot you’ll disappear. Just like
any other line or signpost. Fall right into the spectacle: a place where nothing can
matter—where nothing does matter. One hundred square yards of everything hiding
in plain sight. I started cutting the wood to shape King Rat’s fortress with the hacksaw
that my father had left at our old house. Early on I remember overhearing my mother
ask him to build a doghouse. I never got a dog, but I still have the saw.
The patch of dirt was about a yard across in both directions. I used one of
the two by fours to mark even lines in its face. This would be my basic blueprint for
what was to come. After cutting and nailing together several pieces of wood I had a
rough frame for the palace. I began to build upward from this frame, erecting vertical
beams that stemmed from its corners. In another hour the full frame was built, from
bottom to top. All that I had left were the walls and roof, which I built by nailing
beams horizontally from one corner of the frame to the other. I looked down at my
work. King Rat’s castle looked more like a rustic pioneer’s shack, its edges slightly
askew. It was a sad palace, one that the boy would not approve of, but a palace
nonetheless. I tore a chunk of bread off of the sandwich that I had made for lunch and
threw it into the shack, hoping that it would draw King Rat during the night. I would
make improvements the next day.
The following morning I returned to the shelter, but when I arrived all that
54
remained was a pile of splintered wood. I walked further toward it, my eyes only half
open. I wanted to turn around and get sucked away like a spec of dust through a
vacuum. I rummaged through its shattered frame, throwing pieces in every direction,
expecting to find a pile of splattered guts, but all that I found was the piece of
sandwich that I had left before. Relief engulfed me. King Rat was alive.
I should’ve known that he wasn’t there. Rats remember everything. Every
footstep, every curve and dip in the asphalt. Their survival depends upon it. They
are programmed to always choose life over death, to wander for a while and finally
get crushed, blown in half, have themselves sprayed across the only thing they ever
knew. The rats choose life with the same readiness that death chooses them. Their
entire existence can be characterized by one sound: one singular, beautiful crunch.
Some people liked to stand in the lot. Just stand right there in place
looking up at the neon signs in the windows of the strip mall across the road. Sink
right into them until they could forget about themselves. And all the while the rats
are gnawing away on used apple cores. Sucking water from rocks. Scraping scum
from the sides of dumpsters. Fluorescent white light eats them whole. They get into
their cars and leave. You could lose consciousness in the lot and not realize it. People
would make small talk with me as I took their tickets. “Don’t you get bored here?”
they asked. They didn’t know the real truth behind my position, however. I had to
curate the gallery, make sure each piece was properly framed. I learned to operate
algorithmically. Plot the rats. Plot the cars. Press play and watch them intersect like
galaxies colliding through the aimed lens of a telescope.
Later in the evening I sat in my chair and thought about how I had almost
killed King Rat that day. Figured I would give up on his palace, let him roam the lot
like he was meant to. The boy was nowhere to be found, but I was sure that he would
understand. King Rat didn’t need a residence in the lot. The lot was his residence. He
would continue to live, continue to eat other rats and terrorize patrons freely as he
was meant to.
Rats can’t be governed like men. They have their own rules, their own
system. This space we built for them—this lot—was like one of those huge trash
compactors in the world of rats. It sucked them in like metal and then closed itself,
pushing the air from their lungs until they popped. Was the boy ignorant of this
reality?
I felt alone once again. Could I have imagined this boy as a totem for
myself, something other than the troubled youth that he was? The lot has its ways of
beating its own invincibility into a person’s head. King Rat was one of those devices.
55
He wasn’t going anywhere. The lot was his caretaker, or it is. King Rat could not be
removed by force, only by fate.
For a while it felt like there would always be eyes floating over me in fits
of interrupted sleep. Eyes that wouldn’t stop looking, not until I quit, not until I died.
Severed corneas would roll up to my booted toes, looking at me, never knowing that
there weren’t any faces to complete them. I thought about getting on a plane. Leaving
and never coming back. But King Rat was always there, watching me, telling me that I
needed to stay. I stayed.
I determined that I had to find King Rat. I did a walk around the perimeter
of the lot and slowly worked inward, scanning each and every crack for his long,
wretched face. I looked under every car, kicked gravel into every pothole, but he
didn’t turn up. King Rat was a master at not being found. He could’ve been anywhere.
I walked back toward my shed around midnight. When I sat down my body felt like
putty, like it could have sank into the earth without a trace. I welcomed this feeling, a
body of clay that had sprung from the ground in some freak accident.
It had been one week since I last saw King Rat. The boy came and went with
the yelling man each day, but he wouldn’t chance conversation or even a simple nod
of his head. I had convinced myself that I was the sculptor of a piece that I couldn’t
control, that my art was failing. I’d look at the asphalt in a mental silence and works
would appear: a deep red, neon green, or vibrant purple. All pieces of a puzzle that I
could never solve. Moonlight engulfed me as I paced through the lot, hoping that he
would surface. There were moments when it felt like King Rat’s shadow was the black
surface I stood upon. That he was looming over it all, thousands of feet in the sky. I
whispered into this silence hoping that it would understand my desperation, my will
to forget that King Rat had ever existed in the first place. But forgetfulness became
the enemy. I drifted into places that could not be remembered—the sheer cliff fully
realized by splattered guts at its base. These guts though, they were not King Rat’s.
Fifteen days into my search, I spotted King Rat underneath the yelling
man’s truck. In my mind it couldn’t have been true, but I decided to investigate.
Slowly, I walked over to the truck and King Rat, who was burrowing a hole into
the darkness. Festering there, his eyes were unmistakable. They were spotlights,
spitting insects into the air. I continued toward him, moving as gently as I knew how.
It seemed almost impossible that fortune was on my side, but King Rat didn’t move a
muscle.
When I was closer to the truck, I peered under its chassis. King Rat seemed
56
docile there, like he was tired. Like he had just needed a rest. I found a candy bar
after rummaging through my coat pockets and tore it open, hoping that it would
help lure him out of his hole. The air was cold; the wrapper’s plastic slipped through
my fingertips before it finally gave way. I ripped a piece of chocolate from the
end and laid it on the ground. I did this several times, in fact, laying fragments of
the bar in a hemisphere around the side of the truck that I was on. I waited several
minutes, minutes that seemed to pass like hours. I was alone—in a trance. King Rat
appeared to be locked in this state as well, pondering his options. I moved closer.
The moonlight reflected from King Rat’s greasy coat as if it were a shattered mirror.
He didn’t move.
For the first time in several days, the boy had seen me, and he was soon
tugging at the left sleeve of my coat. He must have walked up behind me during my
negotiations with King Rat. I ignored him at first, thinking that he had simply wanted
my attention. He kept on pulling at my jacket, however, almost to the point at which
he had separated the sleeve from my arm. At his urging, reality’s haze settled back
upon me. I stepped away to see what he wanted. “Dad wants to leave,” he said.
“That’s it?” I asked, taking the boy gently by his shoulders. “Where’s your
dad?”
The boy softly motioned toward the truck with his head. He hadn’t worn
his hat today. Looking backwards toward the truck, the moment seemed to strangle
the breath from my lungs. The air was moist with something that I couldn’t describe,
clouds engulfing an orange moon. I felt that I had made some horrible mistake in
befriending the boy as I heard the truck start, his father now sitting firmly in its
driver’s seat. The boy had seen King Rat there, stewing beneath the yelling man. He
knew he could not subdue the impatience in his father’s gestures. The yelling man
had simply had a bad day at work, or hadn’t met his daily sales quota. King Rat was of
no importance to him, or maybe the boy’s father just hadn’t known that it was the rat
of all rats that lay there beneath his front left tire.
If the boy had known a more hopeless look I would have seen it in his eyes.
He grabbed at his hat in a half-panic, forgetting that it wasn’t there that day. I looked
back at him before the engine started, needing an answer that the boy couldn’t give.
All he could do was stand there just like he always had, listening for the sharp squeal
of rubber on pavement, and then the crunch.
King Rat was dead.
57
In my mind the rats were extinct, buried under years of steadily
crystalizing pavement. The link between them and myself had passed from a spiritual
one to one that is visceral—a never ending anxiety attack. I would sit in darkness
and hear their teeth clinking against brushed aluminum, each rattle louder than the
previous. It reminded me of the days that I thought nothing existed. That everything
was wound tightly into a perfect, incoherent mass. The universe’s ultimate ego trip.
I never saw the boy again after King Rat’s death. I later heard that his father
had gotten into financial trouble, and the pawnshop was soon under new ownership. I
lost eighteen pounds working in the lot. It had ground me down, pummeled my body
into a stringy pulp. The lot had been both my life and home. It never learned to share
itself with anyone like it had for me. Now, I was the only attraction remaining. I was a
sculpture. The lot’s finest work.
The November leaves began to fall like stones—broken and complete,
immersed in hibernation. They would land on the asphalt and blow away without a
rustle. Death consumed everything except the lot’s revenue stream. That remained
perfectly intact. The ground was white, my pockets green. The rats, however, were
only muscle and bone. They melted into the lot’s pavement in the dead of winter, a
feat that I had thought impossible. In December I stopped seeing them completely.
Rats are like nails. You pound them into the ground and they always stick.
Just like it’s their job. Sink into it and grow there for a while. Sprout cracks in the
pavement that reach for miles. King Rat will always exist there, his blood dripping
through the lot’s endless curves, pooling in its pot holes.
The rats won’t change. They can’t change.
They’ll continue to live trivially and die fast: the simple analysis of an
impossible problem.
58
HONEST GOODBYES
RACHEL PANEPINTO
i hope you’ve got the world under foot,
and you’re on page one of your new favorite book.
i hope you took a little time to reflect,
hope you get to look;-- see the signs that connect:
i hope you appreciate,
give some life to the dead.
i hope you find the time to see what’s written,
in the palm of your hand.
i hope you get to bend down peacefully,
and make markings in the sand.
i hope you know i got to cross you;-like a rosary, and how our bodies turn,
like never ending stories.
59
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
ISAAC BERGER
Isaac Berger is a Senior
Majoring in Philosophy and
English. He practices living
lyrically.
HENRY BROWN
My name is Henry Brown, I
am a junior at UB, and I am
an English major. Many of my
stories and inspirations draw
from the power of nature and
mankind’s never-ending,
yet often feeble, attempt to
overcome and control it.
MELISSA CHEN
Melissa Chen is an aspiring
writer from Brooklyn who
has been in love with art
since the third-grade. She
is a third-year English and
International Studies double
major.
CHASE CONATSER
Chase Conatser wishes the
song Buffalo Solider had a
more iconic relationship with
Buffalo, New York. Chase is
from Mobile, Alabama. He
studies Communication
Design and English at the
University at Buffalo. Chase
graduates Spring 2014.
HEATHER COOK
Heather Cook is a senior
at University at Buffalo
studying English with a
concentration in Creative
Writing. She was born and
raised in Buffalo, New York.
When she is not writing,
she enjoys photographing
the architecture scattered
throughout the lovely rust
belt. She wishes she could
have a cup of tea (or two)
with James Joyce.
60
ANNA DAVIDSON
My name is Anna Davidson.
I’m a third year student
from Clarence, NY, double
majoring in English and
Linguistics.
EMMA FUSCO
Emma Fusco is from Buffalo,
New York and a Junior at
SUNY Buffalo. Though she
finds many works in her
major to be very serious and
deep, she enjoys composing
works with satire, wit, and
comedic value.
transferred from Canisius
College this past fall. She
is a commuter from her
hometown, West Seneca,
and aspires to be both a
psychologist and young adult
novelist in the future.
JAMIE GUGINO
Jamie Gugino is a Junior at
UB. She writes every day,
enjoys hugging trees, talking
to animals, wearing masks,
and loves Super Heroes. Art
is Life.
LISA GAGNON
Lisa Gagnon is a first-year
English major and Music
Performance minor at
UB. She enjoys traveling,
Bananagrams, and playing
cello, guitar, piano or any
instrument within reach.
DANA HAVAS
Dana Michele Havas, a
Sophomore in the Chemical
Engineering Department
currently residing in Buffalo,
NY, remembers fondly the
dog-eared pages of Carl
Sandburg by her childhood
bedside.
MICHELLE GASKIN
My name is Michelle Gaskin.
This is the second time I’ve
had the privilege of being
published in Name. I am
originally from Trinidad and
Tobago but consider my
self a Western New Yorker
and Bills Fan for the past
twenty- two years now. I am
a junior here at UB where I
am a double major in English
and Art.
SCOTT HERMAN
My name is Scott Herman
and I’m from Searingtown,
New York. I’m graduating
in May with a BA in English
(Creative Writing Certificate)
and my passion for writing
songs is a constant reminder
to my poems “for the page”
that all words expressed in
essay, music or some type of
art form are still considered
poetry.
SUSHMITA GELDA
Sushmita Gelda is a freshman
sociology major from
Syracuse, NY. She enjoys
reading, writing, spending
time with kids, and going for
nature walks.
LUKE HEUSKIN
My name is Luke Heuskin
and I am an English and
Psychology double major
from the town of Sound Beach
on the North Shore of Long
Island. I write poetry and
fiction, and I draw special
inspiration from my passions
for philosophy, religion,
imaginative literature, and
AMY GORSKI
Amy Gorski is a sophomore
Psychology major who
music.
ADAM JOHNSON
Adam Johnson is a senior
at UB, studying English and
Political Science. He shares
a name with a much more
talented novelist, meaning he
may have to come up with a
pen name in the future.
CHERYL JOHNSON
Cheryl Johnson is a 22-yearold senior English major
at UB. This is her second
year working on the NAME
literary magazine and is
excited to have her work
published. In her free time
she enjoys appearing on
the stage as a lyrical/ballet
dancer, watching films with
her friends, baking desserts,
listening alternative-indie/
folk/rock music, and reading
realistic fiction.
AMANDA JOWSEY
I am Amanda Jowsey, senior
undergrad from Tonawanda,
New York. I will graduate
this year with a Bachelor’s
degree in English as well as
a certificate in Journalism.
Some of my articles have
appeared in Niagara County
Community College’s
newspaper The Spirit, and my
poems have been published
in UB’s Generation Magazine.
LEXI KATZ
My name is Lexi Katz and I
have called Buffalo home for
all my years on this Earth.
I am a senior majoring in
English while focusing in
Creative Writing. I believe
my passion and love for life
has always come into the
sacred rhythm of poetry.
CALEB LAYTON
My name is Caleb Layton. I’m
an English and philosophy
major, who only knows how to
play tennis if there is a net.
GEORGE MITCHELL
George Mitchell, from
Cathedral City, California.
Sophomore English major.
ANNE MULROONEY
Anne Mulrooney is a
junior English major from
Rochester, NY. She enjoys
lemon poppy seed muffins,
Studio Ghibli films, and
poetry.
RACHEL PANEPINTO
Rachel Panepinto is currently
a senior here at UB and will
be graduating this spring
with a Bachelor’s degree
in English Literature. She
enjoys reading, writing,
nature, playing flute, and
traveling.
DAMIAN PANTON
Damian Panton is a senior
at the University at Buffalo,
where he majors in Film
studies and minors in
English. His post-graduation
plans remain hazy, but
he is deciding between
pursuing an M.A. in Critical
Film Studies or an M.F.A. in
Creative Writing. Either way
he’s going to end up writing.
OLIVIA PATICK
Olivia Patick, 19, New York
native
unrealistic, yet ambitious,
English major at UB.
AMIÉ ROMAN
Amié Roman is a senior
double major in English and
History from Addison, NY.
She currently has no clue
what to do with her future
but loves telling long stories
about nothing in particular to
anyone within hearing.
KELLY SCHUCKER
My name is Kelly Schucker,
I’m a senior at UB, majoring
in English and Psychology. I
am passionate about writing,
coffee, and cats preferably
simultaneously.
KENDALL SPAULDING
Kendall is a sophomore at
the University at Buffalo with
a major in English. He’s from
Yonkers, New York which isn’t
too far from New York City.
An avid watcher of film, one
of Kendall’s favorite movies is
The Dreamers.
ALEX THAYER
Alex Thayer is a writer
from Buffalo, New York. He’s
currently living in Madrid,
Spain, working on more short
fiction.
ATHIRA UNNI
A Junior English and
Sociology double major. I
write because it makes me
lie and say the truth at the
same time. I’m from India
that has now moved on from
being the land of exotic
snake-charmers to the hub
of bright IT nerds. Logically, I
fall somewhere in between.
ARIC ZAIR
A current resident and native
of Amherst, New York, Aric
Zair is a junior Music and
English double major at UB.
He has previously published
a short story entitled “Riding”
in Perpetual Motion Machine
Publishing’s Kurt Vonnegut
tribute anthology, So It Goes,
which is currently available
for purchase on Amazon.com.
A recording of him reading
his piece has also been
published to Youtube.
61
NAME Magazine
Spring 2014
Listen to students read work from this issue at:
www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/about/journals/namemagazine.html