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tahoma literary review 1.1
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tahomaliteraryreview.com

About the Cover
Tacoma photographer Wesley Burk captured his city’s downtown
during the blue hour following an afternoon rain. The city’s proximity
to the Puget Sound, and the tint of a passenger bridge window enhanced
the effect. A selection of Wesley’s landscape and nature photography is
featured in this issue’s center section.
II

TAHOMA LITERARY REVIEW
Volume 1, Number 1
Summer 2014
Copyright © 2014 Tahoma Literary Review, LLC
Seattle and Gig Harbor, Washington
tahomaliteraryreview.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact
the publishers by email at publisher@tahomaliteraryreview.com.
tahoma literary review
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Table of Contents
About this Issue: Poetry
VII
About this Issue: Fiction
IX
Ars Poetica Disguised as a Love Poem Disguised as a 13
Commemoration of the 166th Anniversary of the Rescue of the
Donner Party, Amorak Huey, Poetry
Dialectics, Kevin Honold, Poetry 15
The Last Five Years, July Westhale, Poetry 16
Sirius Lament in Canis Minor, Yim Tan Wong, Poetry 17
Don’t Start Me Talking, Miles White, Flash Fiction 19
In Which Case I Could Stay/Open, 21
Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow, Poetry
Gratitude Journal, Leslie Pietrzyk, Fiction 24
Notorious, Valerie Nieman, Poetry 33
Sunday Afternoon Retrospect, Susan Rich, Poetry 35
Conductive Hearing, Ciara Shuttleworth, Poetry 37
What Would Your Mother Say, Charlotte Morganti, Flash Fiction 38
The Phrenologist’s Leap, Terry Wolverton, Poetry 39
Catechism, Emma Bolden, Flash Fiction 41
Shame, Tara Skurtu, Poetry 43
A Survey of Minor Disfigurements, Austin R. Pick, Fiction 44
First Husband, Robert King, Poetry 60
A Letter From Your Dinosaur, Leland Cheuk, Flash Fiction 61
“And they, since they / Were not the one dead, 65
turned to their affairs,” Shaindel Beers, Poetry
Caldera, Rachel Mennies, Poetry 66
IV

Northwest Scenes, Photography, Wesley B. 67
Men in White, Stefen Styrsky, Fiction 75
Fire Season, Carolyne Wright, Poetry 90
The Broken Leg, Amanda Moore, Poetry 93
And Not to Have is the Beginning of Desire, 95
Elizabeth Oness, Fiction
On Frans de Waal Declaring “We Are All Machiavellians” in 108
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tim Kahl, Poetry
Summer at the Horgoš Border Crossing, Jessica Jewell, Poetry 110
Not About Liz, Catherine Moore, Flash Fiction 111
Bow and Cello, Brandon Courtney, Poetry 113
Brothel Song, Jen Lambert, Poetry 116
The Aftermath, Nandini Dhar, Poetry 117
Honored After Rescue Failed, Nicole Robinson, Poetry 119
But For The Streetlamps and The Moon and All the Stars, 121
Katie Bickell, Fiction
Salvatore, Paul J. Willis, Poetry 128
Signs, Diane Lockward, Poetry 130
Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, Stephen Lackaye, Poetry 132
Contributor Bios 136
About TLR 145
TLR Staff 147
You can hear many of the authors in this issue read their stories and poems on
our web site: tahomaliteraryreview.com/listen.
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Thank you to the donors who contributed to the publishing of our
first issue:
Claire Gebben
Betty Ruddy
Alison Jennings
Tim Kahl
Arthur Powers
VI

About this issue: Poetry
I
’ve always believed in the slush pile. It’s a democratic place where every
poet, whether established in the literary community or just starting out,
is assured equal consideration based on the merits of his or her poems.
When we launched Tahoma Literary Review, part of our grand experiment
was a simple commitment to source all of our published material from
the slush pile: no solicitations of work from the in-crowd, no poems fluttering
in over the transom. Just a fair, open-minded reading of every poem
sent to us. Beneath my idealism, though, was the lurking fear that poets
might not share our enthusiasm for this project. Would anyone send work
to fill the slush pile that we’d so hopefully opened
The pages before you represent a resounding yes to that question.
We welcomed work from long-time favorite poets like Terry Wolverton
and Brandon Courtney. We fell in love with poets like Amanda Moore
and Kevin Honold, whose work we encountered for the first but certainly
not the last time. We were met with a wide range of styles and tones, from
Yim Tan Wong’s whip-smart humor to Valerie Nieman’s fresh take on
formalism.
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VII

About This Issue: Poetry
Out of this multiplicity of voices from across the country and cutting
at diagonals across poetic traditions grew a harmonious whole that
filled our pages. It’s not the content of the poems that unites this group
of work—we travel from the Donner Party’s demise to the checkout line
at Wal-Mart (some might see a few similarities here, I grant) to Santorini.
Instead, what binds these poems so snugly together is the poets’ sharp
intellects. Here are poems, anchored in first-rate craftsmanship, that display
not mere curiosity and descriptive prowess, but that truly comment,
with cogent but lyrical logic, on the state of our shared world. The work
collected here demonstrates that poetry, at its best, does not only reflect
our social mores, but also offers us a place to engage them, to question
them, and to ask ourselves what sort of a world we have made for ourselves
and for one another. The poems before you aren’t ones about which
the worn-out critic can wring his hands over poetry’s relevance to contemporary
life; these are poems and voices that unquestionably matter.
Perhaps what excites me most about the poetry in TLR’s inaugural
volume is the breadth of the poets’ visions. These writers demonstrate
a keen awareness of the arts as a creative conversation, not as an isolated
practice. The poets represented here engage with much more than
their own thoughts and experiences of the world; they explore music and
the visual arts, they converse with poets who came before them, and they
respond to received forms while adapting them to contemporary sensibilities.
Instead of focusing solely on the personal and the private, the poets
in TLR have both the finesse and the knowledge to allow their poems
a life off the page—a life in conversation with culture. In short, the
work you’re about to enjoy represents, to me, just what is right with American
poetry.
–KD
VIII

About this issue: Fiction
The fiction in the first issue of TLR may appear, at first, as dissimilar
as literary stories can be. Beth Oness writes of the shadowed halls
of academe, Stefen Styrsky of the secret world of fencing, Katie Bickell
relates the Alberta streets frequented by alcoholic high schoolers. Stylistically
the differences are even more profound: Leslie Pietrzyk rails
against ageism and sexism, while Austin R. Pick speaks through subtle
and irreverent existentialism, for starters.
But within the stories there are similarities. The pieces themselves
often touch on our modern society’s insistence on narrowly focused lives—
not in the pursuit of excellence in a particular discipline, but in the kind
of self-validation made possible through ignorance of the wider world,
resulting in devaluation of those not part of one’s social circles. Ultimately
the stories we’ve chosen, both individually and as a collection, are intended
to erode those boundaries, to find commonalities among our partitioned
lives and to enable a broader understanding of experience, as fiction has
been traditionally tasked.
As E.M. Forster encouraged, it’s all about connections—about seeking
them out as much as maintaining them.
For TLR it’s also about engaging, tightly crafted writing. If there’s
a technique shared among the short stories and flash fiction in our debut
issue, it’s the unsentimental approach these authors employ in getting
at the heart of their chosen matters. Like the best of investigative
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About This Issue: Fiction
journalists they present facts without judgment—stories in which the author
becomes invisible and the characters take center stage, offering the
information they deem important, letting the reader make of it what she
will. Often the most powerful of resolutions occur in such stories, because
the reader can more easily connect it to personal experience. And
in doing so our authors further connect, in this case to the essence of good
fiction. This type of writing is the most thoughtful, both in terms of the
effort it takes to compose it, and in the lasting power of the finished product.
This is exactly what we had hoped for when we first envisioned TLR.
While literary fiction today takes many forms and styles, there is at its
heart a goal of discerning a larger truth from the exacting study of representative
samples. Sounds a bit like scientific method, doesn’t it, except
that our discoveries, our truths, tend to be emotional, not physical in nature—but
just as important; maybe, in light of the unrelenting hatreds
and violence that plague humanity, more so. This imperative for fiction
predates its written and printed forms. It has mattered to storytellers and
their audiences for millennia, and it still matters today.
Or it should. Truth in the public square more and more resembles
the opinions of those who have the financial means to publicize their beliefs,
whether valid or not. Sometimes it’s difficult to see through these
cultural agendas, which mask vested interest in the guise of “giving the
people what they want.” But what about what they need Well, they say,
that just won’t sell. And so cultural segregation persists, is fostered, gets
elected.
The literary journal is a small refuge from such cop-outs, an intellectual
archipelago on which those who reject the popular, but narrow
arguments still congregate, in hopes of sharing a wider, more balanced,
and more meaningful experience.
TLR’s fiction and poetry (and beginning with issue number 2, nonfiction)
will always look for the widest possible spectrum of work to address
that hope. This journal is our attempt to connect more writers to
more readers, to expand the domain of literary writing. We believe the
five short stories and five flash fictions in our debut issue serve that goal.
We’re both pleased and proud to offer them to you.
–JP
X

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XI

Ars Poetica Disguised as a Love Poem
Disguised as a Commemoration of the
166th Anniversary of the Rescue of
the Donner Party
Amorak Huey
This is life: a series of difficult choices ending in death.
Along the way, try not to judge too harshly.
Share what you have, but not all of it.
Also, avoid shortcuts during winter months, or late fall,
lest your own late fall yield a new way of tasting the world—
limb and root, outcome and inspiration—
the height of the stumps reveals the depth of the snow
as the brightness now is equal to the blindness later,
as today will be rewritten tomorrow.
It’s why we must keep moving.
Somewhere in the middle distance, an ocean
rises like a great column of light,
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Ars Poetica
beckons like the salt and sweat of a first kiss.
This is why we carry on so. Knowing hunger
is but the first test. Like this. Only faster.
The season turns. The wind’s slow sway,
the frostbite and flame, the infection creeping—
I thought myself too tired to go on.
Then you appeared, as if from California
or heaven, and held out your hand.
My ghost-bones stirred.
I let you in. You carried me out.
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Dialectics
Kevin Honold
The girl asked the Moon if this was the best of all possible worlds
and he affirmed, after months of painstaking deliberation, that it wasn’t.
In order to answer this question, he said, you must have a working knowledge
of calculus and be hell on logic, too. You must
nurse a healthy suspicion of superlatives—the nicest mafioso is, after all,
probably not very nice. You should prove willing to court heresy, which at any rate
entails no great risk, being legal now and not very interesting.
But the best of all possible worlds will come
round again, I promise. Poets and philosophers will once more run afoul
of shoguns and feudal lords, plays will again spark street riots,
painters will be hauled up before popes. Bells alone will sound
the backdrop of our days, and horses—in a redux
of man’s crowning achievement—will once again be promoted to priests.
We’ll bring firecrackers to our new best possible world to frighten the squatter gods
off the land, and surveyors’ levels and seed to reclaim it. We ought
to bring along a pocketful of this world’s dirt, I think.
You know, just to remind us.
tahoma literary review 15

The Last Five Years
July Westhale
One would like to see oneself walking through the forest as two girls,
along a creek, the golden carp under the ice like blurred poppies.
The tall, hooded girl will extend a basket, offering bread and water, a kindly
face and a thick cloak.
The other is small, with sly hands. She will eat her fill, wrap herself
in the warmth of the wool cloak, cut a branch from a tree.
Whittling the end to a point, she will pull the arrow back, and shoot it
into the throat of the hooded girl. She will retrieve the basket.
16

Sirius Lament in Canis Minor
Yim Tan Wong
Burrowed under pillow and blanket,
I can still hear my new neighbor,
the dog with a repertoire of howl
and yelp, exploding every time
its human starts the shower
or leaves for work. Some nights,
its devotion can rival any opera’s
desperate heroine. The little diva
has played a puppeteer, too, whose yaps
wrest my arms and tug my eyelids
up and out of bed, thrashing me
like a chewtoy, batting me about
in a slam dance. The mutt calls
and I respond with slammed doors,
Goddamns, and volleys of uglier
and equally useless curses. Sometimes
I sway from a foot-wide precipice,
which juts over river rapids
gushing toward madness, a place
where eyes are not allowed
to blink, the water torture is dog
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Sirius Lament in Canis Minor
saliva, and megaphones attack
the ears with every breed of barking.
The leasing office tells me:
The puppy’s owner just put her
in a crate. You’re not the only one
who’s complained.
This fact is no solution and I see red.
Red is the dog’s leather noose,
its own hanging tongue, panting
for the person who makes jewels
of four legs and a heart
stashed in a cramped cage. Eyes
bloodshot, mind strung out on day-glow,
a bit shaky, I’m vexed by my inmate,
that barkbox tucked inside another box.
Most mornings I drive and fall
asleep at the wheel and dream
revolutionary red, a time when dogs
wear navy blue uniforms buttoned to the neck.
Centered on their cotton caps,
a dog silhouette inside a red star.
Crowds of them paw little red
sickle-shaped books, and they aim
their gazes and guns toward a crescentshaped
statue of Sleep, while others
rock it to and fro until they topple
the damned thing, knocking it
to ground-level, so they can smash it
some more with sledgehammers,
then give the head a good kick,
until the moon and stars, far away,
voiceless and weaponless, roll over,
switch on their lights, pull out dream
journals and start to scribble.
18

Don’t Start Me Talking
Miles White
You heard ’bout Jasper’s wife, didn’t you honey Yeah, Betty. That’s her
name. Nothing but ol’ ’ho. Everybody know ’bout her and Rev. Saunders—that
ain’t never been no secret. Soon as he got there, wasn’t even
hardly there a week yet before she coming all up in Sunday school and
ain’t never opened a Bible in her life. Can’t even read. Everybody know
she wasn’t nothing but a tramp before Jasper found her out there laying
on the street. That’s right. I ain’t lying. You ain’t heard that Somebody
beat her up good and left her for dead. Sho’ did. Jasper the one picked
her up and took her over to the hospital. That’s the only reason she living
today. He thought he had fixed her. She sho’ acted like she was fixed
all them years, but you don’t never fix that kinda woman. So she all up
in the church in that man’s face and the next thing you know she taking
food over to his house like she got religion all of a sudden. Tell me she
pregnant. I ain’t lying honey. She gon’ be the death of Saunders and Jasper
both. Watch what I tell you.
You know Jasper ain’t never had good sense his self. I don’t know how
many rug rats he got by how many women but before he found the Lawd
he wasn’t nothing but a drunk his own self. You ain’t heard ’bout Jasper
A man-’ho is what he was, and a drunk on top of that. Jasper used to be
up in the motel with them hoochie mamas all night long then get up the
next morning all up in the church smelling like whiskey. It was a scantahoma
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Don’t Start Me Talking
dal, honey, and everybody knowed ’bout it, too. But you know that man
did find him some religion after they caught him that time up in there
smoking on that crack pipe. They was gonna put him in jail and take away
them kids but the Reverend the one went up there and convinced them
police not to send his ass away. That’s right. I’m telling you what I know.
Ain’t your business how I know. Don’t be asking me how I know somethin’
I just told you I know. I know what I want to know, and I know they
was gonna put Jasper’s ass up in the state penitentiary. That’s when he
found the Lawd. That’s right, honey. He saw Jesus the night they put them
handcuffs on him and threw his ass up in that jailhouse. He been straight
every since, too, praise the Lawd. But then he met Betty.
Nobody but a fool would take up with a ’ho like that, but Jasper was
all saved and everything and was trying to save her too, I guess. So soon
as she got out that hospital he up and married her, and everybody thought
he had lost his last damned mind. Sho’ did. Women were going out they
mind ’cause Jasper was supporting five or six of them. I’m telling you,
honey. Got little nappy head kids running all ’round this county, too. Look
just like him. Then he had some more by Betty. What I heard though
is ain’t but two of them his. She think she got him fooled and maybe she
do, but she ain’t foolin’ nobody else in town. Cars be parked outside that
house all day when Jasper at work. And it don’t just be the Reverend’s
car, either. You know I saw Lucie Mae husband car parked out there one
day. Now what Lucie Mae husband doing over Jasper house in the daytime
when Jasper at work He was in there for a good long time too. Don’t
be asking me how I know what I know. None of your business; I know
that much.
I tell you somethin’ else too since you want to know so much. You
better ask Buddy what he doing sniffing around that house for, too. Who
the hell you think I mean Buddy your husband. That’s who. Now I know
Buddy drive that milk truck and everything, and don’t be asking me who
told me what, but Jasper must be done got awful fond of milk and butter
’cause seem like Buddy be making more stops over there than he do
any of the other houses on that street. Look, I’m just telling you. Why
I got to be lying You go ask him yourself. Everybody on that street know
it, too. Milk truck be parked out there big as day and yo’ husband up in
there for two hours and come back out with the same milk he went in
with. Don’t be asking me…hello
20

In Which Case I Could Stay/Open
Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow
Nobody notices me, I can see in their stride
I am not realized. Nearly trotting past, they covet the blue cone,
the wee light switches, their strings, their soft
feathers and snapping clips. Those waving, penny-candycolored
wands, breaking hearts—their fervent almost-joining.
Ask me how many have assumed me for a minor bench. Did you know
before long they’re going to stop making pennies
Price of copper’s sky high.
I’ve heard the whisperers with their tangled hair: Nothing
to fear, I’ll sit with you, these few minutes. Preening themselves
in shiny distorted discs, like a coven of dogged crows
twittering a secret argot not
meant to me. I don’t care.
I’ve never been afraid. I’m right here.
Middle of the room.
Nobody sees me.
Still, I show like a model.
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In Which Case I Could Stay/Open
See, my heart hammers. I’ve planted it in your fingertips.
Found hearts flutter well. Other hearts bruise easy, and sometimes
bruises are bruises, not symbols. All you do here
is bend down. Like, about to pray.
The surgeon says it’s difficult to perform
surgery on a scarred area. The surgeon says scar tissue
is very angry to be cut.
Once, a man manhandled me, took a palm chisel
to my lips. It was tolerable as now
there is this lux wavelength I share. You stand there, occupied
near pedestals, or by the hors d’oeuvres in the corner,
snacks and chips with their cornucopia whirlings,
like blind squalling kittens or dolphins caught in net.
Tina in the gift shop runs the cash register.
The tune looping perpetually in the utility room, not
her favorite. Bee Gees were her mother’s
generation, the one that went without education
to educate their own. It costs
three cents to make a penny. Found hearts
flagged in concrete.
I’ve told her since I arrived she can touch me.
And I’m telling you: I am the one you are allowed
to touch. I have family.
My husband made me the box I am today.
Put hinges to my spine
for you to swallow my amplitude.
He said, If you can’t do something safe
for me and delightful for the two of us
then I can’t live this way. Which was when I made up
my mind to go public. I like candor. Nothing snickers at me
as my words cascade in a rush, when my mouth
can’t keep up with my heart. Which is why, if you don’t heed me
I will up my tongue and trumpet
until everyone noses over, and gossips we’ve come together.
22

Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow
So come closer. Long ago I learned
a true exotic dancer never needs to use the pole.
In the meantime, you’re crazy
for the eye of a drop. And wire hangings. The needle-width wire precariously
married to rocky romance.
And blocks with clocks
that tock.
Lift me. Open sesame. Open gingerly.
Part my durable mouth this very moment
for my one well-endowed exuberance.
I’m trying to tell you I can’t make myself wider.
I’m cherry, that’s how warm I am. More
than anything I love you.
You can kiss those pennies goodbye.
after Julianne Swartz’s artwork OPEN (2009), as part of the HOW DEEP
IS YOUR art installation at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2012)
tahoma literary review 23

Gratitude Journal
Leslie Pietrzyk
I
’m grateful that—as of today—I am a fifty-year-old woman in America.
I’m grateful that when I express distaste for turning fifty, someone
will chuckle and say, “Better than the alternative.” I’m grateful that
no one listens when I speak—my opinions, my thoughts, my feelings: all
are talked over and dismissed—and I’m grateful that a fifty-year-old woman
in America might as well be a cockroach, skulking along the dark corners
of the culture, something objectionable, an unseen thing scurrying
under sudden and blinding light that might illuminate a crepey neck, raised
veins, and crow’s feet. I’m grateful for the phrase “crow’s feet” because
it’s preferable to have chosen the ugliest, most obnoxious, nastiest bird
to stamp all over our faces, so I’m grateful the phrase is not “mockingbird
feet” or “chickadee feet.” I’m grateful for birthday cards that joke
about adult diapers and being “over the hill” and that claim to have sex
secrets for old folks and then open to a cutout mask of a hot, blonde, twenty-year-old
girl. I’m grateful for my sense of humor because if I couldn’t
laugh I would have to find an alternative, and that alternative might
involve a gun; I’m grateful there are gun laws in my state that make it
difficult for me to get a gun because I don’t know what I would do if I
had one.
I’m grateful that I didn’t grow up in a grateful tradition as part of a
cozy family holding hands and praying and trusting God and spouting,
24

Leslie Pietrzyk
“The Lord will show a way,” or, “When God shuts a door, He opens a
window,” or, “The glass is half-full,” or any of the other pithy remarks
that keep the registers ringing at the Hallmark stores, phrases that are
embroidered by Chinese factory workers on poly blend sweatshirts lining
the racks at Wal-Mart. I’m grateful that my family was unhappy, uncommunicative,
unsocial, uninvolved, and uninspiring. I’m grateful that
my parents tried their best, and I’m grateful that their best wasn’t all that
good because otherwise I might have grown up with expectations and
hopes. I might have imagined, say, that I or maybe a woman like me only
smarter, could one day be President of the United States. I’m grateful
for the American health care system that has created uncaring insurance
behemoths that don’t pay for therapy; if I could afford therapy, I might
not have instead bought this gratitude journal at the Hallmark store, and
for that, I am indeed grateful.
I’m grateful that construction workers don’t whistle at me anymore.
It was degrading and demeaning and horrifying to sashay past a group
of men who were all eyes and mouth, all leer. How I hated having that
innate power over them, how I hated their anger spilling over into vile
words right off a bathroom stall, the choke of hormones and rage and
that “Hey, baby,” blasting my way. How I hated hearing the honk and
rumble of a freshly-waxed, black Trans-Am trolling past, as if a blaring
horn could lure me over, as if the bait might be that simple: car, cigarettes,
the bottle under the seat, a hank of long hair flopped over one eye, right
hand loose on the wheel, the left draped through the open window. Feral
eyes locked onto mine.
I’m grateful for hormones and rage, especially rage.
I’m grateful that when the sales clerk goes to help not me, first at
the counter, but instead the man in the suit—with the limp crease in the
trouser legs; the sewn-shut buttonholes on the sleeves; the shiny, saggy
spot on his ass from sitting in a cheap swivel chair in a cheap fabric-coated
cube for the last twenty years—I’m grateful that now I snarl, “I was
next,” without bothering to sugarcoat it with, “Excuse me, but I believe
that…,” or, “I’m sorry, but I think that….” When one is filled with rage,
a fact is undeniable: if you are next, you’re next. I’m next.
I’m grateful that after I snarl this statement of fact, the clerk—pudgy,
pasty, like a wad of biscuit pulled off a pop-up dough tube—rolls his eyes
slowly and deliberately and lets out a sigh that spews out the force field
tahoma literary review 25

Gratitude Journal
of his breath so that everyone in the general vicinity now knows that for
lunch he ate a dirty-water hot dog from a cart on the street and insisted
on extra onions because they were free and that he walked away without
even a quarter tip for the hot dog vendor, without even a kind and
sincere thank you, just plunged his big, beige choppers straight down on
that dog, smearing mustard across his mouth, leaving a slash of yellow
in the crusty corner of his cracked lips…a prelude to now, when he hisses,
“Yes” making the word a hundred letters long, glaring at me, wishing
his eyes could shoot death-ray lasers for real, like his comic book hero,
Drug Store Clerk Man, because if he could, I would be dead-dead-dead,
and what a favor to society that would be, because who am I, who am I,
except a fifty-year-old woman who happened to be next in line And who
is he, who, pray tell is he, but a man in the all-important and highly coveted
marketing demographic of eighteen to thirty-four
I’m grateful I don’t have to buy pregnancy tests at the drug store. They
were so pink or blue, so yes or no, so working hard to stay neutral knowing
a buyer could fall on either side of the yes/no divide because this really
was one of the few irrevocable decisions to make—plus or minus, one
or the other, and always that stupid joke about not being “a little bit pregnant”—and
how the clerks, too, tried to appear neutral, even as they cast
suspicious glances at your belly.
Once you passed that gauntlet, at home the box would sit on the
counter for one more day, one more day, when you were hoping for NO.
Or if you were hoping for YES, it would be jabbed open with scissors,
ripped to shreds, yanked from the wrapping and raced into the bathroom
as immediately as humanly possible.
And then there were times where you weren’t sure what you were
hoping for and that was worst of all: that moment when you saw the one
true word on the little piece of plastic, because that’s when you would suddenly
know, you’d know what you wanted, but that one true word that
showed up was the opposite, opposite and irrevocable: unless.
Unless you were in the unlucky one percent, not the ninety-nine percent
accurate group, and I have to say that truly I was grateful for that
one percent, where for several days I was thinking that way instead of the
exact other way and so going about in a haze of inexpressible happiness,
and so I was grateful—very grateful—to be reminded that science isn’t
perfect, though we often imagine it is and long for it to be.
26

Leslie Pietrzyk
I’m grateful that I have so much more time to myself now, and by
this, I mean specifically the hour between 4 AM and 5 AM when the world
is asleep, and yet I am awake, compiling mental lists of animals in alphabetical
order because an online article on nowyoureanoldlady.com assured
me that lists create order and order brings restful sleep, and during
this hour I’m also grateful to be reading long, endnote-heavy biographies
about important men who ruled the world and had affairs with
passionate, lusty women and who are memorialized with enormous tombstones
where their names are engraved deep into the heart of somber granite,
and during this hour I’m also imagining a blank white wall, a blank
white wall, built brick by brick, higher and higher, all white, brick by brick,
white like drifts of snow, like billows of clouds, streams of milk, a white
wall, soothing, calming, soothing, a fucking white goddamn wall, and then
I’m flipping through channels on the TV, grateful that I’m not a celebrity
drug addict in rehab for the second, third, or tenth time, speaking “candidly”
about the “important” lessons learned about “forgiveness” and “redemption,”
grateful that I do not have a fancy high-def TV that would
make plastic surgery appear as a pathetic horror show instead of maybe
a worthy option and a good use of 401K money, and also grateful the 401K
got hammered in the last stock thing which means the decision was basically
made for me. It’s also during this hour—TV remote still clicking—
that I’m grateful that I am not a professional athlete of any caliber or ilk
who is tearfully breaking down in a press conference or on a field and
grateful that my poker skills are limited to knowing that a bra does not
under any circumstance equal a man’s boxer shorts. I’m grateful that when
I’m back in bed, not sleeping, often I hear the echo of my own heartbeat,
that hypnotic pounding, and I feel the rise and fall of my chest as my lungs
pump oxygen, and what I’m thinking then is that each breath, each beat,
might be the very last, and understanding that reality makes me, yes, grateful.
I’m grateful men blatantly and shamelessly lie on their online dating
profiles. Otherwise, I’d be wasting my time meeting men who actually
are six feet tall and who actually do have a job as an “executive” (or
even a “job”) and who actually do like animals and who actually are not
three hundred pounds, give or take fifty. I’m grateful for the lawyers who
are still bitter that their ex-wives ended up with the dog by claiming in
court that the dog was for the kids when it was really that “the bitch knew
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Gratitude Journal
I loved that dog,” and I’m equally grateful for doctors who are still bitter
that their ex-wives ended up with the beach house with the custom
wine cellar, and for men of all sorts who forgo their child support payments
so they can tool around in their charcoal gray BMW Z series or
whichever letter is more than Z at this point, for the men who run fantasy
football teams and who trade their quarterback via text while the waiter
is reciting the specials in a monotone and who then ask the waiter to
tell them again about the beef, even though no beef was mentioned. I’m
grateful, also, for the men who go pop-eyed and gape like fish when the
subject of an art museum is mentioned or a novel that wasn’t written by
a man with a military background or a film with subtitles, a gallery, performance
art, contemporary art where a painting is not of an identifiable
“thing” and might not even be a painting or even on canvas. I’m grateful
for the men with sailboats who say that any woman they’re with has
got to tie six different knots and then roll up the cloth napkin to begin
instruction. I’m grateful for men who give 21-44 as the target range for
the women they’re looking for, when they are 45 or 55 or 65 or 75. I’m
grateful for men who like “restaurants, movies, travel, and holding hands
on the beach,” because there are so many people who don’t, who don’t
like those very generic and clichéd things at all, and so I’m grateful for
a man who does like them because I happen to like those things too, and
so now I can see that this man and I have a very good chance at making
a special “connection,” and so I know to “shoot him an email” right away
so we can carry on a lengthy correspondence about “the beach.”
I’m grateful for men who travel so much and who are so important
that in the end, they don’t have time for anyone, ever, and so they pass
through my life as a vapor of emails, texts, voicemail, Facebook “likes,”
and online nudges, pokes, and winks, until abruptly they dissolve completely,
like the contrails of so many airplanes distantly and silently circling
overhead.
I’m grateful to restaurant hostesses who give me and my female friend
the bad table near the kitchen, near the bathroom, near the stand with
the sloppy water pitchers: the hostess with her long legs and impossibly
high shoes and that cascade of hair down her back and her perfect posture
and her entire other life where she is an actress or model or artist:
the hostess with the elegant fingers that fumble the menus when she hands
them to me and my friend because she’s distracted, eying the group of
28

Leslie Pietrzyk
preening men sauntering through the door, knowing any member of that
pack of alpha dogs would salivate at the thought of going home with her
tonight, and that she might pick one, but only if she feels like it, and that
for her it would be that simple. She would never wake up the next morning
and feel used up or saggy or lost or sad or embarrassed or smelly, and
she would have no qualms about using his toothbrush without asking or
finishing the carton of ice cream she found in the freezer. I’m grateful
to her for that bad table because I’m too far in the back to watch it all
unfold, and so I only have to imagine it.
I’m grateful to my first love, my college boyfriend, grateful that he
left me to go to law school, and I left him to move to the East Coast, and
that our silly little love didn’t work because we were young and stupid
and young and sex-starved and young and that he found me on Facebook
and that sometimes he calls me late at night across two time zones, and
we talk about those old days, and we get to laughing so hard that I almost
pee my pants but don’t as we remember that day we fucked in the
library’s handicapped bathroom during finals week and that day we set
off the fire alarms with the burnt pizza bagels in the toaster oven and that
day he ordered sloe gin fizzes for both of us at the tourist-fancy restaurant
at the top of the John Hancock Building, and the waiter said, “Yes,
sir,” as if we were real people and not silly little underage students in love.
We reel through all the stories that only we know, the code words—“Sherman
Snack Shop”; “pizza turnover”—remember when remember how
remember that—and I’m grateful that every time this happens, I hold
my breath—though I don’t intend to, I never intend to—expecting that
he might start a sentence with the words, “Maybe we should…,” and I’m
grateful that he never says that or anything close to that. I’m grateful that,
as it turns out, he’s calling drunk and lost and sad, and there’s a high-pitched
female voice in the background, and I’m grateful, I guess, that he never
starts that sentence so he never has to finish it.
I’m grateful my ex-husband left me because he was bored. I was bored,
too. We were all bored, and God knows, there’s nothing worse than being
bored, and I’m grateful that I’m no longer so fucking, goddamn bored.
I’m grateful that I’m not a famous and beautiful movie star because
transitioning from goddess to grandma as a famous and beautiful movie
star sounds really, really hard, what with all the money to fork out for
plastic surgery and the diet of antioxidant-rich meals that the personal
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Gratitude Journal
chef prepares and working out for several hours a day with the on-call
personal trainer who drives to your house and Playboy phoning your agent
to offer a suitcase of money because everyone wants to gawk at what you’ve
turned into and how “she looks good for her age” is the only compliment
now, and you would take it as a famous and beautiful movie actress because
you are so accustomed to getting attention and being stared at and
jerked off to that you seriously think you might die if all that were to dry
up, and you’re stalked by photographers who post online pictures of you
without make-up, wearing sweats, holding one gnarly, veiny, spotted hand
in front of your oversized, sunglassed face, and after too many of those
photos you become a recluse with several fluffy white cats with unpronounceable,
pretentious Russian names, and everyone assumes you’re dead
until you actually die and then the photos they run with the obits are always
of you in your prime, your glamorous years, you looking fabulous
and beautiful and perfect, and so in the end, it’s almost as if you never
really did age at all, and we remember you as the famous and beautiful
movie star, the gorgeous, young and vibrant woman. I’m grateful that my
problems are not anywhere remotely along those lines because that all
sounds very tough, and I probably couldn’t manage tough problems like
that, so I’m grateful that I don’t have to.
I’m grateful for all the hours I spent playing with Barbie; I’m grateful
my Barbies lived in a Dream House and drove a Dune Buggy and
owned a hundred tiny outfits (minus the shoes that got lost in the shag
carpet and sucked up by the vacuum cleaner); I’m grateful that Barbie
always had a perky smile painted on her face and that her breasts and ass
were firm plastic and that her knee joints were exceedingly flexible both
ways and that she was born with feet in the convenient shape of a stiletto
heel. I’m grateful that Malibu Barbie had a rich and golden suntan glowing
evenly across her entire body and that she never bothered with sunblock
because, of course, Barbie couldn’t contemplate anything as yucky
as skin cancer. I’m grateful Barbie didn’t worry about one single thing
because if she had, she might have discovered wrinkles creeping onto her
pretty, painted face, and that wouldn’t do at all, because Barbie’s main job
in life was to be cute for Ken, and I’m grateful that Ken, with his plastic
hair and smooth groin, was so totally worthy of Barbie’s devotion.
I’m grateful for the vast array of skin creams that have been invented
to stop my face from sagging, wrinkling, pruning, drying, parching like
30

Leslie Pietrzyk
the leaves on the houseplant that no one remembers to water. I’m grateful
for creams and lotions and serums and masks and masques and concentrates
with SPF 1,000 that firm, lift, defy gravity, hydrate, nourish,
rejuvenate, redefine, restore, repair, reshape, recharge, minimize, erase,
and promise an end to fine wrinkles, unsightly wrinkles, spots, lines, pores,
that are to be applied at night, under my daily routine, just out of the shower,
in dabs, under the eyes, in areas that require extra attention, on dry
patches. I’m grateful that these instructions all promise that I will see a
“noticeable” difference in thirty days, because at the moment, time is definitely
what I have plenty of. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to pay
a hundred dollars an ounce and also grateful to consider what ghastly damage
I might be wreaking upon my poor, parched skin by using the ten
dollar, drug store brand that’s as sticky as a piece of candy left on the car
dashboard in August. I might add here that I’m grateful for costly hair
care products and time-consuming hair processes and for the way my hair
stylist knows that it’s time to go on vacation when my roots are showing.
I’m also grateful for wax.
I’m grateful for reading glasses, grateful that I can look like a schoolmarm
as I squint at a menu in a dimly lit restaurant, grateful that I have
yet another item to misplace, so I can chirp, “Darn it, I know those glasses
were right here,” and when I locate them in some obvious place, I can
say, “If it was a snake it would’ve bit me,” and sound just like my mother,
which I am grateful to do. I’m grateful to sound like my father, too,
when I gripe to the waiter, “Can’t you turn the music down” I’m grateful
to bring a shapeless cardigan sweater to restaurants to avoid air conditioning
drafts.
I’m grateful that clothing stores assume that women like me want
to dress like an old-style nun with flowing shawls and zany patterns that
look like crop circles. I’m grateful that there is a lot of chunky jewelry
at these stores, that nothing on the racks is sleek or fitted, that elastic is
used liberally and secretly, that the salesladies laugh and say “the girls”
when they’re talking about my sagging tits. I’m grateful for the words
“zaftig” and “muumuu” and Nordstrom’s “Encore” department. I’m grateful
that any time I do see someone younger than I am in one of those stores
with the stacks of cat sweaters and jackets with giant painted wooden buttons
and a rack of soft, black flannel purses with pink rose appliqués, that
she is there with her mother, encouraging her mother to “try on the
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Gratitude Journal
turquoise to bring out your eyes.” I’m grateful that I don’t have an adult
daughter who will offer me trite shopping suggestions or who will take
me out after this day of shopping for a crisp glass of Sauvignon Blanc at
a cozy French restaurant with excellent chocolate crepes or who will ask
me to babysit on Friday nights, so she can have date night with her husband,
my son-in-law, who I am grateful not to have, so I don’t have to
worry that he’s not good enough for my daughter.
I’m grateful for the phrase “a woman of a certain age” because otherwise
I might derive satisfaction from the harsh and bitter joys of our
English language; I might skirt the shiny euphemisms and plunge straight
to the tang of truth, to words that don’t roll off the tongue loosely but
that are sharp and biting and true: bitch, crone, biddy, bat, hag, bag, witch,
shrew, old lady. Old, old lady. I’m grateful we don’t speak this way anymore.
Because now it might be possible to slip through the whole aging
“process” without ever once noticing or having it brought to my attention
how useless, old, and pathetic I am. I’m grateful that the phrase—
“a woman of a certain age”—hides all nastiness under a red hat or wraps
it all up in a purple feather boa’ed veneer, and I’m grateful for this veneer
that makes everything look on the surface so much better. Indeed,
I’m grateful most of all for that.
32

Notorious
Valerie Nieman
Need Press Repeat: ’Green,’ ’Sex,’ ’Cancer,’ ’Secret,’ ’Fat’
—headline from The New York Times
It would become later, though not at first, a secret—
an affair worthy of a Restoration rake and a green
girl, all about the sex sex sex,
urgent, as though a diagnosis of cancer
had sent a shudder through the fat
of my frame, alarm bell tolling, no longer safe.
It had been one thing to feel safe
with him, to sigh after love like the Secret
after the Offertory—another to roll in the fat
of indulgence, to gourmandize until green
in the face, a real Tropic of Cancer
romp through a corn maze of sex,
itchy and hot and exhausting. No need to sex
up the story—middle-aged woman flees the safe
haven of post-marriage celibacy, the slow cancer
of a new old-maid-hood, virginity secreted
for reuse by matronly Hera at some green
bosky pool—too bad it’s that other goddess considered phat
tahoma literary review 33

Notorious
enough for contemporary tastes. I had dropped the fat
into the fire, breathing sizzle for substance, sex
as a refuge from that familiar green
goblin who rides the shoulder of a once-wife—now safecracker,
plunderer, other-woman. His secret
now become my secret, a karmic realignment of Cancer
and Scorpio, claws clacking. Isn’t it true, after all, cancer
is just a crab, side-shifting, clutching the fat
chicken rump only to be reeled from the bay like a secret
agent summoned from the cold In such late-season light, sex
appeal fades like an superannuated actor—wrinkles, age spots, safe
combing-over of hair—doomed to a perpetual green
room! Ludicrous, perhaps, to give the green
light to lust when straddling 50, when concerns should be cancer
prevention, glaucoma, pension—but I’d not be a woman safe
as the unsharpened edge of an implement, fat
as the fingers of an incurious man employed to sex
chickens, a known quantity, unsuspected of any deep dark secret.
In the safe review of the rearview mirror the affair wobbles away, fat
in the ass—anticlimactic as a colonoscopy sans cancer. Still, sex
kept a branch green in diminishing days. Now, finger to lips: “Secret!”
34

Sunday Afternoon Retrospect
Susan Rich
I plan to be used for a higher power
the way some unknown orange powder
overnight transformed to America’s
beverage for walking on the moon.
I’m not sure why, but I’d like to be remembered
longer than the dial tone, jukeboxes, or the gold roll
of the nearly deceased Kodachrome.
Please miss me like Walter Cronkite,
like the easy tilt of the pinball machine,
the cash register that sweetly opened
in a revelation of ca-ching.
Make my higher purpose jazz
pianist of the typewriter keys,
blues mistress of the carriage slide
tahoma literary review 35

Sunday Afternoon Retrospect
and holy ping of it—
Let these lines etch a place for the friendly
embrace of the milkman,
his name embroidered along the chest of his bright uniform.
Goodbye to candy cigarettes, handkerchiefs,
Sunday nights with The Ed Sullivan Show.
What deemed something useful—
from reel-to-reel recorder, to pickle barrel to self,
and then with a trick
sent them packing like Chaplin’s little fellow
How short a time until the Keurig,
the Kindle, the whole organic
make-up parade will simply be airbrushed away
Perhaps in retrospect I’ll be enduring daydreamer
in shades of cerulean and grey.
My higher purpose might be happening
right now on a Sunday afternoon
as I tie my shoelaces and walk towards home
holding the antenna for one black and white tv.
36

Conductive Hearing
Ciara Shuttleworth
You wait and it doesn’t come back.
Somewhere not too far north, a train derails.
You’re still listening for the sound
of a fog horn, think it was a dream,
your imagination, a semi. Maybe.
Or maybe you heard the train slip the track on a curve,
still three miles north, and since you weren’t
paying attention, and since the shriek of metal and mouths
had to shiver through tunnels
and rain and wind pushing back against it,
can anyone blame you for mistaking your loneliness
for the ocean The train curled like you on its side, ground-facing
ditch light blown, the other a beacon
toward the sun. The lone headlight
shines down a day-lit track.
tahoma literary review 37

What Would Your Mother Say
Charlotte Morganti
If she knew she left the back door unlocked one night the winter you
were three and you went looking for her, you in your nightie and Teddy
in his brown fur coat. If you told her you had to stop searching because
Teddy was afraid of the dark and your feet were cold and the nice
men with deep, soft voices and the car with the blue and red lights gave
you and Teddy hot chocolate and a doughnut.
If you explained that it wasn’t the religion but the kindness of the
sisters that mattered and others like you were at the home too so you stayed
there because if you and Teddy left the others would be alone.
If she had come to parent-teacher night and heard what promise you
had and how, with not even a miracle, you could be anything you wanted.
If you whispered to her what it was you really wanted.
If you told her you gave up school to be a wife three years ago.
If you confessed about the baby and her daddy who married you so
the baby could stay with you and that he doesn’t mean to, but sometimes
the worry of a family makes him strike out and how last night, he got so
worried that they had to keep you in hospital. If she knew he left the back
door unlocked and your little girl went out into that cold wintry night,
searching.
What would your mother say, if she had chosen your warm, hopeful
hugs in the single-wide over the hot, sloppy embrace of the man in
the tavern so long ago
38

The Phrenologist’s Leap
Terry Wolverton
The bumps are nothing more than
familiar transactions with matter,
quantum dress-up for the cranium.
Fingering the fleshy landscape
does not yield meaning; the cortex
unfolds as it was born to,
not as you imagined.
It dresses up like a drag king
on a midnight Friday;
its wardrobe of references
conveys a complex nature.
The map of a life is chemical;
you struggle to read its rubbery
mysteries, but won’t listen
to the disappearing body.
tahoma literary review 39

The Phrenologist’s Leap
No different than other creatures,
it swims in an old language.
Do you think it dumb, that black realm
before your understanding All
the conditions tell you, “Come,
take that next long leap.”
40

Catechism
Emma Bolden
God poked two holes in the back of Sister Nathaniel’s skull and stuck
two eyes there. He made them blue as her other eyes, and every
morning she prayed and teased her hair with a rat-tail comb to cover them.
She closed all four eyes to keep them safe from hairspray. God puts His
eyes in every wall because God is always watching. God puts a bell on
every door so God can ring it any time. When the Virgin Mary knocked
on Mary Ann Van Hoof’s screen door, she wore a blue mist and a copse
of trees and said women were sinners for showing their ankles and shoulder
blades and breasts. If you hem your skirt above your knees, you prick
Mary’s feet and fingers and heart with a thorn. Never ask why. God will
melt your teeth and turn your tongue to blood. God will turn His Host
to blood in your mouth if you use your mouth to say His Host isn’t His
Flesh, or to ask Patrick if His Host tastes like Saltines, or if you walk
through the Church’s back door with the Host tucked between your teeth
and cheek. Let His Host melt. Try to chew it and each bite will scratch
the scabs off of Christ’s stigmata. Don’t play with a Ouija board unless
you want the Devil to tell you what God doesn’t want you to know. Don’t
touch a Tarot card unless you want the Devil to live in your hands. Everything
your hands can touch, the Devil has touched first: wine glasses ringing
the Christmas table, paperbacks shelved past your hands and their
reach. The Devil keeps his lips on your ear. He shouts and he whispers.
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Cathecism
He speaks and you listen. You speak. The Devil is your ear, your lips, the
tongue lying inside your lips as they open to tell a lie. Pray without ceasing
he leaves be. Pray without ceasing he leaves you with your wickedness.
Pray without ceasing for what you should be: a white rose at the
Virgin’s feet, a lamb with its neck stretched, prone as a sky.
42

Shame
Tara Skurtu
Overnight, someone has epoxied a bright pink dildo
onto the Virgin Mary outside the Sacred Heart Church.
It’s Sunday. From the café window I watch a woman
cover her son’s eyes and make the Sign of the Cross
as they head past the statue’s outstretched arms,
up the steps. A stranger at a neighboring table says,
Worse than the time some asshole in Hopkinton stole
the plastic baby Jesus right out of the manger.
I remember that. A sign in red paint: Shame on you
if you stole Jesus! I saw it on the news at Braintree Station
that Christmas eve. The camera panned a field
of lighted reindeer. Then Mary, palms in prayer at her chest,
and Joseph, on one knee, admiring a basket of snow.
tahoma literary review 43

A Survey of Minor Disfigurements
Austin R. Pick
Our elders, in my experience, are no longer reliable fonts of wisdom.
A week or so before my visit to the home of the Reverend Ron
Rodgers, for instance, Rebecca’s grandparents came to town. They are
unnaturally active for their age, and take great piles of supplements at
meal times. She brought them to my apartment; I don’t know why. Perhaps
to see that though we claim each other, we live apart. Perhaps to
take pleasure in their sense of displacement.
Some time before we met, Rebecca lived for a month in a primitive
shelter in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, learning to attune to her surroundings,
learning to become, she says, uncivilized. She is a great believer
in people experiencing places and situations where they are not comfortable.
Displacement, she calls it.
She has a theory, which she attempts to explain with a glass of water
and some object retrieved from my table. Old cassettes. Stolen office
supplies. Newly painted chessmen. A hand grenade. “See,” she says with
a splash, “the contained environment”—she means the water, a portion
of which is now wrinkling the pages of various manuscripts and leaflets
—“has by the flow of displacement gone beyond its confines. It has expanded,
become more than it was. And through the glass we see stuff differently,
enlarged and clarified.”
“Yes,” I say, knowing that she considers this a good and spiritual thing,
44

Austin R. Pick
“but part three of the Gorsky lectures” (on tape) “is now ruined.” I say
this every time, tirelessly, inserting whatever item of mine has been doused.
Except the hand grenade, which is a merely a paperweight, and thus can’t
be much affected. I concede this point.
Regardless, Rebecca shakes her head dismissively and despite my reservations
leads me away from her example and on to her next project of
displacement—to clean, well-lit spaces where we do not belong: hospital
gift shops, scenic overlooks, city council meetings, shopping malls, convention
centers. When we go to such places Rebecca likes to act “normal”—that
is the other part of her game. To pretend that she is not unkempt
and that I am not slovenly. To stroll about and admire things in
soft, well-modulated tones. To keep our hands to ourselves. Our presence,
she says, is enough. Once she took me to a military air show. I do
not trust her.
Her grandparents were not at ease, in my apartment. They were not
comfortable. There is no furniture to sit on, for one thing. They stood
near the door. Papered with pages torn from my notebooks, the ragged
walls seemed to intimidate them, and in the dead air of our stunted conversation
they nudged with their boots at the books and things lying
around. I inquired about their matching outfits. “Why are you wearing
matching outfits” I said.
“Because we’re the Haffenbargers!” they said in stereo, smiling for
the first time and hustling their fisted forearms with geriatric enthusiasm.
“So come along pardner, and hear a real mountain tale!” They threw
their heads back and laughed together, loudly, the practiced laughter of
old times and fun fun fun. I eyed them narrowly. Rebecca explained that
they perform mountain tales and mountain songs for children. I was afraid
they were about to demonstrate, but with their hands flapping, they hastened
to provide a breathless account of all the hand puppets, ukuleles
and amusing hats they require to “get into character.”
Apparently just casual wear, their buckles and bolo ties. They were
in town for an annual “roundup,” they elucidated, but couldn’t obtain passes
for the two of us, despite Rebecca’s persistent interest. I produced a
dirty look when she inquired again, knowing what she was thinking. Perceiving
an absence of childlike wonder in my vicinity, her grandparents
began to gasp and chuckle effusively, waggling their heads and eyeing my
hand grenade warily.
tahoma literary review 45

A Survey of Minor Disfigurements
I imagine them in their home, surrounded by an assortment of timid
plants and blanched watercolor prints. Wood paneling. Candy dishes. A
small, sympathetic dog. I imagine them working on new material, crafting
their facial expressions, perfecting their timing. I imagine her murmuring
tunelessly while she cooks. He comes up behind and tenderly grips
her waist. She turns, and catches his cowboy hat in the forehead. I imagine
him waking to find his matching outfit laid out, descending the stairs
to a wholesome breakfast and a rodeo of skittering pills. The new day
looms, his wife already plotting. Their routine is fortified against the intrusion
of unpleasant realities, a confederacy of two. It is perplexing how
they tolerate themselves.
Rebecca, with that gleam of hers, told them I was considering finishing
the degree I’d dropped a few years ago and perhaps pursuing graduate
studies, which is not true. “Well I graduated from the school of hard
knocks in 1949!” Grandpa Jim said, his big face beaming. Grandma Sallie
rapped at the air, eyes wide and mouth thrown open with campy pizzazz,
clicking in time with her raptor-like tongue. I picked up a lighter
and with it singed a few idle hairs on my hand. Then we went to lunch.
Youth too seems a dubious repository for our aspirations. I’m beginning,
for instance, to grow suspicious of my neighbor. He keeps odd hours; that’s
the first thing. I, too, keep odd hours, which is often necessary for unusual
behavior. You have to keep them guessing, the ones who may be
watching you. Also he is a young man of cheerful outlook. Too cheerful,
if you ask me. His motivations are mysterious. People of sunny disposition
have their secrets. Often they are engaged in activities that one
is wise to be suspicious of. He comes and goes, jingling keys, untangling
wires and earphones, always tapping at the screen of some gadget or device.
He is a teaching assistant at the university, he tells me. He teaches
computers, he says.
Teaches computers what, I wonder Does he instruct them to perform
music of their own composition To construct sentences, to think
To dazzle with elaborate prognostications of the future, complete with
charts and graphs I often learn about various projects of this kind through
my reading, in libraries. Beginning with the newspapers I proceed slowly,
absorbing the deleterious stirrings of the world, the turmoil and unrest.
The news media can’t be trusted, of course, but one must start some-
46

Austin R. Pick
place. They say that print is dying, that the future is online. But the Internet
is forever in flux, subject to revision. I read surreptitiously, holding
the pages close.
I scrutinize the fine print, cross-referencing the names of board members
and substantial shareholders. I leave notes in the margins, urgent underlinings
for the benefit of other readers. Budget allocations. Research
and development. Automated processes. Defense contractors are frequently
involved, extending their reach, diversifying their accountability. Their
precise motivations remain obscure. But I can infer them. They have already
taught computers to watch us. They have cameras in the corners
of rooms, grids of surveillance along the sidewalks, microphones on the
undersides of chairs. You have to keep your voice down.
He often seems preoccupied, my neighbor. I am not too preoccupied
to notice. I notice many things. His laughter, for instance. I can hear
it in the hallway, echoing inside his room. It is not the laughter of casual
conversation. He must know as well as I do that all communications
are being observed. They have enacted legislation, which is encrypted
against understanding. They maintain public records in archives where
the public, in my experience, is not permitted. They have databases, in
banks of servers far underground. Watchful machines. Monitors. His
laughter bursts forth in packets of amusement that tumble over one another.
I turn the locks.
My neighbor has many associates, but never admits visitors. They wait
for him downstairs, propping up their bicycles and standing in the sun,
forever stretching their limbs. I can see them when I crack the blinds,
young and radiant with good feeling. It is unnerving. They are evidently
unaware of the sinister privileges of the central banking system, and
the hazards of accelerating ozone depletion. Or else they are deliberately
oblivious, busy with their exertions.
My neighbor cultivates an active lifestyle, always going out. He is one
of the smoothie people. I can hear him in there, in the early morning,
blending at high speeds. The walls are thin and I sleep fitfully, the sounds
complicating my dreaming. I hear clattering spoons, glopping yogurts
and swishing powders, fruit crudely chopped. Sometimes, there is humming.
Such people are tantalized by natural flavors, mingling in various comtahoma
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A Survey of Minor Disfigurements
binations. One sees them in the windows of fitness centers, gripping water
bottles, droplets flailing as their hairless legs bark at the glass. The
kind of people who yearn for island vacations, spacious suburban
homes, heated affairs with coworkers. They appear to be under the impression
that everyone is improving themselves with equal gusto. They
are compelled to concoct smoothies, to lick their lips with satisfaction.
It strikes me as an excessive amount of effort, simply to avoid chewing.
I achieve the same result by swallowing my food whole, bisected occasionally
with the snapping of teeth. The stomach is a powerful organ,
a cauldron of insurrections. I wince and keel as it performs its machinations,
setting my chest aflame. I am not interested in improving myself. I wish
to limp and grumble, to celebrate the revelation of my various deficiencies.
The body oozes and excretes, itches and squirms, clenches and curses,
seldom keeping to itself. But it produces solid results. One moves here
and there, maintaining a watchful eye.
My neighbor cannot seem to sit still. This has given me the idea for
an article, which I’ve sent to one of the alternative lifestyle magazines.
Entitled “Smooth Sailing with Blended Breakfasts,” it is an informative
piece in which I casually insinuate a correlation between breakfast shakes
and digestive dissatisfaction. Incontinence would be too strong a word,
even here. Mine is a subtle art, convoluted and canny.
I am a visitor at the Revelation Auditorium. It isn’t a church, exactly, but
it has a reverend. The Reverend Ron Rodgers has some interesting things
to say about the impending collapse of civilization. I attend his presentations
regularly, though not regularly enough to be considered regular.
Rebecca is unaware of these visits. There are many things she does not
know.
The Reverend Ron Rodgers doesn’t outwardly refer to the breakdown
of society. You have to infer his intent. You have to understand
the message in a certain light. It remains acceptable to speak openly in
religious terms, especially when one appears eccentric, even apprehensive.
This is particularly effective, I’ve learned, when it is possible to observe
the speaker in person, to witness the movements of the facial muscles,
the beading of sweat, the fervent glimmerings of the eyes. The Reverend
Ron Rodgers blinks meaningfully. Messages are conveyed.
48

Austin R. Pick
Of course there is also the Internet, linking computers between brain
stems. It expands in self-referential spasms, overflowing with ensnaring
affinities and countervailing ideologies. Uninformed opinions. Individuals
with assumed identities, and agencies with assumed individuals. Personal
profiles. Doctored images. It is difficult to determine who can be
trusted. They have methods for monitoring every inquiry, every keystroke
and impulsive click. I avoid it whenever possible. I activate multiple accounts,
and mask my fingertips with adhesive tape, in libraries. Still it bleeds
through the walls, bends around membranes, cascades across radio frequencies.
You have to sequester your thoughts. You have to filter them,
mentally.
Despite certain risks, it remains preferable to encounter one another
“in the flesh.” This is an expression the Reverend Ron Rodgers uses often
at the Revelation Auditorium, speaking figuratively, I believe. Such
presentations are not being watched so closely. Things can slip through,
information can be passed along. Certain words and numbers, emphasized
repeatedly. The significance of economic and political events. Signs,
portents, distractions to be avoided. I am not fearful, merely attentive.
The Reverend Ron Rodgers is a great inspiration for me.
When I’m writing my articles for the magazines I apply myself in
the same way. I write between the lines. The editors do not know, or
they understand completely. It makes no difference to me. I have readers,
that’s the thing. Concerned citizens. Gardening enthusiasts. Admirers
of sports cars and recreational watercraft. Young adults. Active retirees.
I write articles on a wide range of subjects, for several marginally popular
publications, under a host of excessively ordinary pseudonyms. Kenneth
Morgan: “Killer Instincts: An Interpersonal Insight.” Tom
Larkin: “Evict Aphids with an All-Natural Application.” Molly Andrews:
“Where My Mascara Runs, I Follow.” I am not especially knowledgeable
about any of these things. I do little or no research—what’s important,
after all, is the content. I write on the Internet as well, posting
authoritatively in forums, referencing nonexistent sources. I edit encyclopedias,
online.
I don’t read any of my articles in print. Newspapers I can endure,
but the glossy ads in magazines too often distract me, their assertions infiltrating
the integrity of my own impulses. I often see other people, however,
reading on trains and buses, in libraries. When Rebecca reads my
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A Survey of Minor Disfigurements
articles, she asks questions I can’t answer. She suspects my intentions. She
occasionally says things that mystify me, such as: “You haven’t been acting
yourself today.” Such as: “You didn’t write this.” Perhaps she can’t
yet grasp the nature of my subterfuge. I have often wondered if the Reverend
Ron Rodgers has ever read any of them. I have reason to believe
that he has.
Following him home was easier than I expected. It was very casual.
One evening after a presentation he was conversing with several of the
regulars. I never converse with the others. It would be too forward, too
overt. We express our mutual understanding through deliberate avoidance
of one another. We know that we know. That is enough. One must
not forget that one may be watched, even in unwatched places. I sit in
the back of the auditorium, which is a converted automotive maintenance
center. I sit near the quart-oil display, which is now a rack for Bibles. The
overhead projector flickers temperamentally, lending an ominous overtone.
This does not appear to be inadvertent.
The Reverend Ron Rodgers is calculating and subtle. He is a great
inspiration for me. He subtly invited me to dinner at his home. He did
this by inviting the others while I was standing nearby, deliberately avoiding
them. I noted the date and the time, and later, by following him from
an agreeable distance, discerned the address. I noted the way the regulars
held their Bibles before them, modestly. I copied this procedure while
I stood looking at the ceiling tiles, deliberately not listening to their every
word.
Rebecca maintains that I cultivate various compulsions and curious patterns
of thought. Folding her hands placidly, she admits that this intrigues
her. I raise objections, indicating the soundness of my methods and the
conclusiveness of the available evidence. “There,” she will say each time,
squinting decisively, “you’re doing it again.” We proceed in this way, exhausting
ourselves with argumentation, furtively satisfied. I do not reveal
that our courtship constitutes my first significant involvement. Relationship
would be too strong a word, at this juncture.
She asks about my past, and I respond by inventing a series of extravagant
liaisons and licentious entanglements. Sitting with her legs
splayed amidst the ruin of my apartment floor, Rebecca listens raptly, alert
and indulgent. She detects certain themes that interest her. Habits and
50

Austin R. Pick
inclinations. She often speaks of my character as if it were something separate
from myself, something that could be measured by submersion in
water, with definite shape and contour. She tells me that she enjoys my
company, and I remind her that I am not a business owner. She grins and
fidgets. There are times when I can almost hear her thinking.
Rebecca busies herself with a handful of developing theories about
social behavior, which she contrives while pursuing obscure errands and
odd jobs around town. Returning forgotten items, for instance, or following
railroad tracks. As an anthropology student, Rebecca has a lot of
free time. She has theories about her own behavior as well. Once while
watching TV as a child, she was exposed to a commercial for a packaged
food product that claimed to be “made from scraps.” This is what she heard,
and her grandparents were not present at the time to correct her. She believes
the experience was formative. She believes it molded her early views.
I have educated her about the consolidation of conventional power
structures, and the malfeasance of modern agribusiness. To my surprise,
she is not overmuch surprised. Such information corresponds with her
basic conception of lopsidedness in the world. Resources mismanaged.
Priorities warped. Neurochemicals imbalanced. Rebecca tests the theories
she is developing by changing her behavior to influence various situations,
encouraging awkward interactions. Gauging responses. Assessing
impressions. When acting on one of her schemes, she is glib and impish,
eyes flashing behind her thick glasses. She is not very attractive, Rebecca,
but she does exude a certain piquant charm. She visits me often.
I’ve begun to suspect that I am the subject of several ongoing experiments.
“Masturbation,” Rebecca conjectures matter-of-factly, straightening
her frock, “is probably the most common therapy in history. Talk about
relieving stress. It might even be the original form of self-help.” This idea
pleases her. She describes herself alone in her own apartment, recounting
with sufficient detail how she rubs and gushes, plunges and roils. “Vigorously,”
she adds. This is one of her favorite descriptive terms. She questions
me vigorously. I perspire and percolate. We have been involved in
this way, talking excessively, for several months. She always excuses herself
to the bathroom at this juncture, and I am left to my own devices.
I did not tell Rebecca that I was going to the home of the Reverend Ron
Rodgers for dinner. I did not momentarily entertain the idea of inviting
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A Survey of Minor Disfigurements
her along, as a project of displacement. That would only encourage her.
She had, she informed me, recently taken a job as a phone surveyor. “You’re
helping them triangulate cell towers” I asked. “Are there any unexplained
or mysterious wires Are government agencies involved” No, she clarified,
with what I detected as a hint of exasperation, government agencies
are not involved. “To your knowledge,” I added.
“No, to my knowledge government agencies are not involved,” she
said. “It’s a call center, so I call people,” she continued, enunciating very
carefully, “and conduct surveys, which consist of a series of questions about
various issues. We collect people’s responses.”
“Hmm,” I said, thinking it over. “And who receives this information”
“Not government agencies,” she said quickly. She often anticipates
the things I mean to say. She is not very intelligent, Rebecca, but she does
possess mild powers of inference. Apparently, from the way I turned my
back to her and invested my attention in a book about satellites, she inferred
that the conversation was over and that I preferred to be alone.
After she left, I clutched a Bible and went to the home of the Reverend
Ron Rodgers, for dinner.
In order to avoid suspicion, one must behave in a way that is neither
overtly unusual nor suspiciously ordinary. On the way to the home of the
Reverend Ron Rodgers, I did not dodge streetlights or make my route
a circuitous and confusing one. Nor did I wear a dinner jacket or smoke
a pipe. Instead I simply walked at a moderate pace, clutching a Bible and
making an effort to subdue the severity of my scowl, the belligerent tumult
of my stride. As I crept along the leafy streets, I attempted to adopt
an air of basic neighborliness. My shoelaces and ill-fitting garments seemed
to snag on every reaching tree branch and trimmed hedge, however, complicating
my efforts to appear at ease. Such a charade, I thought reluctantly,
muttering under my breath, would be difficult to maintain. I do
not look the part at all.
Perhaps I will have to begin shaving. I have never liked to shave,
though I cannot grow a proper beard either. It is patchy and shriveled
at best, a rangy and tangled warren. Rebecca says that I look as if I were
abandoned by wolves, though my eyes peer out of the thicket, shining
and inquisitive. This, she says with a sidelong smile, is my single redeeming
feature. She is curious to know what I look like, she tells me. I assume
it is another of her investigations.
52

Austin R. Pick
I didn’t learn to shave from my father, as one is supposed to. There were
intimations that he would teach me, but his presence was usually muted.
Instead I learned through several hours of cautious experimentation, after
having seen a movie. Lethal Ambition 2 or 3, or was it Deadly Diffidence I
can’t remember which. At any rate there is a scene where the rough and tumble
street cop shares a touching and instructive moment with his precocious
young son just minutes before there are a series of especially fiery explosions
outside the window. Even strokes. Steady hand. Never go against the
grain. I cut myself a dozen times, my face scalded by aftershave and pasted
with tiny toilet paper bulletins. I haven’t shaved a single hair since.
The home of the Reverend Ron Rodgers appeared to be a bastion against
suspicion. It was a rancher, very square and symmetrical. A little sparsely
furnished, perhaps. I let the screen door hiss shut with a little slam,
to indicate my arrival. There was potpourri. A betta fish in a bowl. A basket
of familiar periodicals in the bathroom. I noticed several articles I had
written. Tim Harris: “Spring Cleaning for Songbirds,” in which I allude,
obliquely, to the assassination of a senator. Janet Evans: “A Glass of Wine
a Day...,” in which I suggest, stealthily, that headache medications are
agents of mind control. For the benefit of his wife, I imagine, the Reverend
seemed surprised to see me. His wife was as old as she looked. There
was spaghetti and garlic bread. “How about some wine” I asked, bread
in my mouth. It was a joke. To my great satisfaction, the others did not
laugh. Even there, in the home of the Reverend Ron Rodgers, they were
excellent at avoiding eye contact.
“Eh...” the Reverend said to me, motioning.
“Tim,” I said, winking. ’Janet’ would have perhaps been too brash.
“Yes, Tim. Well, since we have you here now, perhaps you could share
with us how you came to your commitment in Christ” I immediately
apprehended his meaning.
“Well you might say that a certain understanding has fostered within
me a commitment to the...understanding that underscores many of our
observations about the movements of certain organizations and various
‘natural disasters’” —I provided quotations with my fingers— “in the global
situation. On Earth.”
“Hmm,” the Reverend murmured, pausing reflectively. Choosing his
words. He always chooses his words carefully. He is a great inspiration
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A Survey of Minor Disfigurements
for me. “Tim,” he said. This was my name, I remembered. “Tim you strike
me as a thoughtful young man, and I’d like to ask you what kind of importance
the second coming of Christ holds for you, personally” He was
referring to the death of capitalism and the nihilism of the State. He does
this often.
“I believe that it presents several opportunities for people, for new
forms of expression. I think I may write a book of ‘scripture’”—I didn’t
provide quotations, the intonation was enough—“afterwards, I mean.”
The room was very still. I found it interesting that the Reverend had taken
such an interest in me.
“I’ll just go get the dessert,” his wife said. The Reverend nodded.
“Tim before you arrived we were discussing how we can better prepare
ourselves for the second coming of the Lamb of God. Mary Ann here
was suggesting that we can—”
“Build a bunker” I said. Another joke. It was ignored.
“That we can reflect on the revelations of scripture and strive to recognize
God’s grace as it manifests in our everyday lives. Would you like
to say something about God’s grace, Brian” An indistinct man at the corner
of the table cleared his throat.
“Well first of all I’m mighty thankful for your wife’s fine cooking this
evening.” Everyone chuckled. There was blushing, and gelatin in little
dishes, with whipped cream.
“What about the time of the beast” I asked, leaning forward. “The
seven visions of the dragon” I had much anticipated having an opportunity
to inquire about the seven visions of the dragon. I had inferred
that the Reverend could be speaking about nuclear hegemony. The slight
girl to my right, Mary Ann, stopped in mid-chew, a small cross dangling
from her neck. She appeared to be staring at the holes in my t-
shirt.
“Yes, Tim. These are some of the mysteries of God’s revelation to
us poor mortals,” the Reverend said calmly. “They are images which help
us comprehend God’s plan and purpose for Creation. Visions like these
offer us glimpses of the magnitude of the End Times. They are guiding
lights in a world of darkness.”
“Amen,” said the others. The room was very still again.
“Mary Ann, please,” the Reverend said, smiling deferentially. Mary
Ann resumed chewing. The Reverend waited patiently, his gaze unwa-
54

Austin R. Pick
vering. She corrected her posture. “Tim, do you agree that we inhabit
a world of darkness” he questioned, returning his attention to me with
eyes intent on finding mine.
“We could only pretend that it were otherwise,” I said, hanging my head
heavily and adopting a somber tone. It seemed I had earned the Reverend’s
confidence. He waited, resting upon clasped hands. “However, we must pretend...
otherwise. Otherwise,”—I lowered my voice—“they may begin to suspect
that we’re developing,” my voice fell to a whisper, “suspicions...”
The Reverend regarded me severely. He reclined, crumpling his
mouth in contemplation and shifted his weight to cross one leg over the
other. There was a tension in the room that rippled around us with the
creaking of his old wooden chair, stifling all other sound. He appeared
disappointed, somehow. Perhaps I had been too obtuse.
“Bear in mind,” he replied after a moment, drawing in a deep breath
and sighting me along the sharp line of his nose, “that the Seven Churches
of Asia were admonished to steadfastly maintain their commitment to
the revelation of Christ, despite their isolation. They were even called
upon to endure persecution for their beliefs.”
“Amen,” said the others. There was a clattering of cookware. His wife
had begun stacking the dishes, but the Reverend extended a judicious hand,
and she returned herself to her seat.
“Tim, are you willing to suffer persecution for your commitment to
our beliefs”
“Which ones” I asked, shrinking a little. “I’m still unclear about the
visions of the dragon.”
“Maybe he should come along to one of our other meetings,” Brian
said helpfully. The room was preternaturally quiet. Mary Ann
coughed, lowered her eyes. The Reverend ran a hand over his jowls and
down the length of his tie. Choosing his words carefully.
“Scripture tells us that in the End Times there will be war, and famine,
and pestilence, and disease. There will be wave after wave of sorrow.” I
could tell that his mouth was dry. But he did not take a drink of water.
He must know as well as I do about fluoride. “Events have already begun
to unfold. Our first responsibility is the security of our families.”
“Amen,” said his wife, into her lap.
“And floods,” I added. “There will be floods. If global warming goes
accordingly.” The Reverend looked tired. He spun a fork idly, with latahoma
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A Survey of Minor Disfigurements
tent malice. I did not feel at ease. Suspecting that I had not been entirely
tactful, I excused myself and politely found the way out on my own,
through the front door, the way I came in.
Despite Rebecca’s various explanations, I remain unconvinced about the
benefits of displacement. Things often seem disturbed in such interactions,
minds jettisoned from their habitual areas of comfort. It is unsettling.
A little too shifty, if you ask me. The outcomes are ambiguous. Referencing
someone named Lévi-Strauss—of no relation to the multinational
clothing corporation, she assures me—Rebecca says that anthropologists
are the astrologers of the social sciences. It is her secret hope,
she tells me, to help people perceive the stars.
If she is being literal then we may have to leave the city. The air here
is hazy with effluvium from the local dog food factory, and frequently reeks
of simmering viscera. One grows accustomed to it over time, salivating
liberally during sleep. I haven’t left the city in years, content as I am to
observe nature’s urban resilience. Tree roots buckling concrete. Ivy quietly
smothering houses. Squirrels foraging for cigarette butts, their tails
twitching peevishly.
Nature programs often show seedlings bursting forth in little tremors
of time-lapse growth, and Rebecca claims that this can actually be observed.
She claims to have seen it herself, while living alone in the wilderness
of New Jersey. You must remain absolutely still, she says, and concentrate
on a single area. She would often sit in the forest for hours,
her back inflamed and her haunches numb, absorbed in the animate entirety.
She feels that the experience was transformative for her. I suggest
that she may, at that point, have been hallucinating. But she insists
it’s possible to see any situation in the same way, by becoming quiet inside.
Civilization, she says, is an epidemic of noise and confusion. She seems
to intuit that progress emerges out of turmoil and unrest, confrontation
and struggle. Teeth tearing at tissue. Wailing, and the wriggling of little
limbs. It is instructive to accompany Rebecca in the park. But I do not
inform her of the impending honeybee scarcity, or the calculated resurgence
of smallpox. That would only incite her. She is already too easily
excited by her own ideas.
“Hello sir, my name is Chastity, and if you have a few minutes, per-
56

Austin R. Pick
haps you’d like to participate in a survey with me.” It is not a question.
“Chastity” I ask. Rebecca giggles. We are seated back-to-back, legs
buckled, on my apartment floor. Rebecca wishes to survey me. It is her
newest experiment.
“Lets get started. Are you the head of the household, sir”
“Who is this How did you get this number”
“Stay in character!” Rebecca yelps, pushing against me.
“I am in character,” I say. Something is stirring in me. I feel light headed,
almost giddy. Our closeness is exhilarating. “And yes, I suppose I am
the head of this household.”
“Great. Okay, next question. How many family members are currently
ambidextrous”
“With the hands or the feet” I reply, cleverly.
“Oh, that’s good.” Rebecca says, making a note. “Let’s go with hands,
for now.”
“In that case, there was a rumor about an uncle of mine, but nothing
I can confirm.”
“That’s fine. Now then, how many scars or imperfectly healed wounds
do you possess, and how did you obtain them”
“What kind of questionnaire is this, young lady” I bark, striving to
sound indignant. Rebecca sighs delightedly, bubbling over.
“It’s a survey of minor disfigurements and unusual abilities. I wrote
it myself. I also have questions about sunspots, warts, protuberant moles,
lazy eyes, oddly shaped toes and extra teeth. A lot of people have them.”
“Which ones”
“I’ve started slipping the questions in during other surveys. It’s really
interesting what people will divulge. I often tell them stuff about me
too, as I go along. Candor makes them comfortable. I’m collecting all
the statistics. And if it’s going well then I always ask if they have an innie
or an outie. That’s one of my favorites.”
“Which one constitutes a disfigurement” I ask, sliding a hand to my
belly.
“Well, neither. It’s just interesting. So far innies are much more common.
I’m wondering if there’s a correlation to personality type, but it’s
sort of a work in progress.”
“Do you inquire about psychic powers” I have certain concerns about
psychic powers.
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A Survey of Minor Disfigurements
“No,” Rebecca says, “but I test for it by thinking of a number and
then asking people to name one randomly!”
“23,” I say hurriedly.
“Oh, wait. Hold on. Ok, now try.” In this way we’ve created a new
experiment, which has been occupying us for some time. Our accuracy
is incrementally improving, and I’ve even begun to respond without inventing
answers. Something is stirring, and I feel awkwardly expansive,
like a bloated membrane of warbling pores, unctuous and effusive. Recently
I’ve developed hiccups several times from suppressing sudden fits
of laughter. I’m beginning to suspect that my neighbor may suffer from
a similar sensation, resulting in the overflow of mirth I often hear, my
ear pressed to the wall.
Rebecca has given me ideas for a new kind of writing. In it I will be
forthright; I will convey my thoughts directly. Probably no one will believe
me anyway. Probably they will present it as fiction, in magazines.
The possibilities surround me from every angle. I will adopt new pseudonyms,
expanding my subterfuge and referencing various little known
facts. Veracity, cloaked in anonymity, is inebriating. My brain sloshes to
and fro, afloat in its humid juices.
I have not returned to the home of the Reverend Ron Rodgers. Nor
have I attended his presentations with any more regularity, though he continues
to loom robustly. His approach, while mysterious and compelling,
seems to have certain deficiencies. He is a great inspiration, but his specific
intentions elude me. I am intrigued, but uncertain. As humans our
deficiencies are various and manifold, giving us shape and dimension, providing
the outline of our individual insufficiency. I am beginning to observe
the entanglement of my flaws, the conspiracy of my contradictions.
My perception wavers in a diffuse new terrain, dizzying and inconstant.
Perhaps the moon is in a curious orbit, tugging at my nerve endings.
I wish to embrace Rebecca. I wish to express my predilection for her
presence, to thrill her with various theories we can test together. To achieve
displacement, even. To turn both shoulders warmly toward, extending
appendages and removing her thick glasses at last.
I’ve exchanged my moth-eaten shirt for one merely wrinkled and coffee-stained.
The windows are covered with fresh newspaper, the takeout
containers arranged in an artful midden. Soon I will begin shaving, scouring
vigorously against the grain, cutting closely.
58

Austin R. Pick
Between aimless youth and decrepit old age, we will investigate our
idiosyncrasies. We will wait until we’re sure we are alone, until the surrounding
laughter subsides.
Rebecca will enjoy this game.
tahoma literary review 59

First Husband
Robert King
As it turned out, the last time she spoke
to him on the phone, his body so spent
with living all his breath went into the one
syllable of her name, was the date
of their anniversary, denied
by divorce but still remembered.
She wavers between fate and chance
in a random collection of days,
hundreds of anniversaries if one
thought about it. She thinks about it.
“Inside,” we say. We hold things inside
that wander the hallways, visiting
this room, that, until one door opens
to the outside, to what’s not us,
and things come out, escape, end up.
“How it turned out,” we say.
60

A Letter From Your Dinosaur
Leland Cheuk
Dear Leland:
Thank you for the play you sent me for my birthday. I’ve never been
much of a reader of plays, especially ones written by old white men. I find
their brand of insistent, self-inflicted suffering difficult to relate to, but
because I appreciate the gesture, I will not disparage your gift further.
You’ve proclaimed in recent interviews that you are a “self-made futurist.”
That my gratitude would appear to you in the form of a letter must
seem quite obsolete, written on this flat-world mash of dried cellulose
pulp, rather than typed and invisibly couriered via the now-hallowed institution
of electronic mail (or worse, the computerized socialization mechanisms
your generation worships). How “old-school” I am, to rely on that
horse-and-buggy, the Postal Service! What did you call me that time I
visited you in college A dinosaur
I am doing well up here in Portland—thanks for asking. I know how
much it pains you to call; I’ve read you much prefer texting. I don’t leave
the house much these days. Everything costs money, and I have little. Remember
when you told me, “a career in education is a financial death sentence.”
As if you needed to educate me, Mr. CEO of a Fancy Internet
Company.
Now you’re rolling your eyes. You tire of me bringing up financial
issues. You believe in the American myth of social mobility. You like to
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A Letter from Your Dinosaur
think that you’re a businessman whose creations make the world a better
place. You tell journalists that your wealth is just a fortunate byproduct
of your prodigious work ethic and God-given creativity. You tell journalists
you’d be an entrepreneur for free: that’s how passionate you are
about your daily quest to improve the lives of others.
But when you were a child, you didn’t want to go to Saturday Chinese
school because you said, “Only poor kids who can’t speak English
go there.” You only wanted to be friends with wealthy whites. By the time
you were in middle school, you were selling baseball cards, keeping stacks
of cash in one of my empty cigar boxes locked inside a desk drawer in
your room. One day, you came home with a black eye because one of your
customers discovered that his purchase was far from the mint condition
you’d promised. You bragged that he hadn’t seen the rounded corner because
you’d sanded it down with an emery board. You claimed the boy’s
dissatisfaction was his own fault. Even in third grade, you believed in the
theory, which many of your peers today espouse, the theory that in business,
cuckoldry is the fault of the cuckolded.
I wonder how an anecdote like that one would fit into your public
relations agency’s manicured narrative of the executive hero it spoon-feeds
to the features editors of glossy business periodicals.
Speaking of narratives, last night, I read what you sent me. Look Back
in Anger, by John Osborne. Did you choose that one because you think
I’m angry and inert, like that ranting, working class fellow Jimmy Porter
A rather obvious comparison, don’t you think Maybe you’re right. I am
angry. I haven’t been able to find jobs here, just as I failed in Spokane,
Seattle, Eugene, and Boise. No teaching for dinosaurs. Administrators
take one look at me and practically sing that they’d rather hire someone
young enough to be my grandchild. On my seventieth birthday, I had a
bowl of ramen for dinner, alone.
I’m thinking about driving to San Francisco for a visit. I feel that as
I get older, I want to be close to my family. You probably think this is very
selfish of me, since I abandoned your mother. I guess that’s another commonality
I share with that Jimmy Porter. We both loved someone outside
our marriage. But I’ll have you know that Karen, whom you’ve never
asked after despite the fact that we were together for over twenty-five
years, was the love of my life. That is, before she left me for that rich white
poet last year.
62

Leland Cheuk
I should never have married your mother. A friendship does not a
marriage make. I never felt passionate love for her. Our union was something
I thought I could endure. For you. Though my actions were not,
my intentions were pure.
I apologize for insisting on not attending your wedding because of
your wife’s whiteness (and because, I think you would agree, she’s also a
bit overweight).
I’m sorry for neglecting to send a gift after the birth of your daughter,
though in fairness, you’ve never sent me a photo of her, and I don’t
even know her name. I’m only aware of her because your mother mentioned
the arrival of “her new granddaughter” in her annual, eight-page,
eight-packets-of-glitter, holiday ramble.
I apologize for standing you up seven years ago, when you were in
Portland for business. The thought of you buying me dinner, laying down
your corporate expense card before me like an Olympic medal, literally
made me nauseous, so I unplugged my phone and stayed in for the night.
It is not without reservation that I plan to visit. I’ve never liked San
Francisco and its love affair with its own mythologies. Even when it actually
was the harbinger of a paradise that never materialized, it was only
so for a segment of a segment of whites. As for today’s San Francisco, the
new and emerging utopia is a coin-operated one. Progressiveness is a luxury,
energy-efficient car, a boutique, a green-built hotel, a solution for
world hunger that pools the resources of the rich and exists only for those
who drink the Internet like water.
You probably don’t often hear this type of honest talk in your genteel,
entrepreneurial circles. You’re probably so offended that you’re about
to crumple this letter and throw it into your beloved talking, platinum
waste receptacle mentioned in that Forbes feature. You might even delicately
slide these pages into your murmuring paper shredder, so evil these
tree products have become. You look down on me, like you looked down
on the poor kids in Chinese school. You don’t say that in your dull interviews
about computer software and the World Wide Web, and you’re
probably afraid to say it to my face, but I know what you really think of
me.
But you know what, Leland I’ve grown softer with age. You’ll see.
I’ve been thinking a lot about grandchildren. In the same way that many
women have very specific visions about their weddings, I’ve recently retahoma
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A Letter from Your Dinosaur
alized that I have always expected to have lots and lots of grandchildren.
You know what’s funny Never imagined having children! Can’t exactly
have one without the other! No one ever said visions were required
to make sense.
On the topic of making sense, it makes none that you hold your grudge
against me in perpetuity. When I stay at your place, we must reconcile.
I don’t deserve your hatred, Leland. And you don’t deserve to have me
out of your life. The time for forgiveness is now.
I think about forgiveness every night before I go to sleep, as I watch
this rising pile of bills, as I dare not open the envelope I know to be an
eviction notice. That’s right, Leland. You always were a bright boy. You
understand what this letter has been about all along. Mr. CEO of a Fancy
Internet Company can make my bills vanish with a swipe of a card,
and your coffers would hardly dent. You see, I’m not that dinosaur in that
silly play. I understand what it means to be a citizen of your new and emerging
utopia. We all must make money, and if we’re not good at it, we must
rely on those who are.
I envy your success. Does that make you feel better I hope you remember
that good feeling you just had. I hope you also ask yourself
whether you’ve made your own, comparable mistakes, whether you’ve
had your own personal indiscretions. And if the answer is yes or even
maybe, then I hope you can begin to understand why I believe we can
be father and son again.
Please reply and give up your anger, son.
Your dinosaur is coming to town.
64

“And they, since they / Were not the
one dead, turned to their affairs”
Shaindel Beers
After Robert Frost’s “Out, Out—”
Every creak becomes a swinging rope, the halo of light
cradling him as he hung in the barn’s large doorway. The way
her screams felt like they were coming from somewhere else.
She remembers everything about his neck. Putting her nose
into the crook between head and shoulder, breathing him in
the first time. All the times she worried when he would wear
her necklaces, play with neckties. All her fears about that fragile
stem. When he was first learning to sit up, she would put him on
a blanket, watch his head follow her like a flower tracking the sun.
Later, it was sunscreen and aloe, it was learning to tie a tie,
then medals for track and senior keys, straightening his bowtie for prom,
and lastly the purple when the paramedics cut him down—
How do the mothers go on The ones who still see the ball chased
into the street, who pass the bike helmet on the hook, dust the trophies
on the shelves of bedrooms never, ever entered, except sometimes
tahoma literary review 65

Caldera
Rachel Mennies
Thira, Santorini
If the Minoans told it right, we sleep
somewhere in the toeprint of a lesser god,
wind banging the side of the island,
shaking and shaking our bright blue door.
The Minoans who loved their palaces,
built and lost and built, their femurs
and ribcages preserved at Knossos
and Akrotiri for all of us tourists to see.
Ribs I, your new wife, watch heave as you sleep,
because now you’re the whole palace, the ruins
under the ash, the thick god tongue
of lava. The thing the gods would take
from me first, seeing through my bones
to my heart of sulfur and iron,
knowing exactly what to burn, what to leave
for the next smitten fool to archive
in a thousand unchanging years.
66

Northwest Scenes
Wesley Burk
Living in the Shadow of Mt. Rainier
Like most photographers, Wesley Burk provides traditional portraiture
and event photography to his clients. But when this Pacific Northwestbased
photographer travels to the pristine regions surrounding his
Tacoma home, the artist in him emerges.
Wesley’s portfolio can be viewed at wesleybphotography.com, and on
his Flickr account.
tahoma literary review 67

Northwest Scenes
Foggy Forest
68

Wesley B.
Fading Past
tahoma literary review 69

Northwest Scenes
Mt. Rainier Sunset
70

Wesley B.
Falling Down
tahoma literary review 71

Northwest Scenes
Capitol Lake
72

Wesley B.
School’s Out
tahoma literary review 73

Northwest Scenes
Flower People
74

Men in White
Stefen Styrsky
13.
Seth stands in his bedroom, naked. Here is a life’s moment, he thinks.
The note Matthew left yesterday taped to the bureau. (A sentence: I can’t
take the competition.) His favorite book on fencing, By the Sword, amid
their bed’s rumpled sheets. The photograph on the nightstand snapped
that day he and Matthew canoed the Potomac, both of them holding paddles
and wrapped in life preservers. Balanced on the radiator, an empty
wine glass, cloudy with fingerprints.
He could wonder what these details say about him and Matthew. Instead
Seth dresses and busies himself cleaning the apartment. It’s a learned
behavior. His mom swept and dusted after arguments with his dad. She
said housework kept her from obsessing about her shattered life. But her
nervous condition made impossible anything other than half-hearted attempts:
a pass with a rag across the dining table, maybe the vacuum cleaner
up and down the center of the rugs.
The kitchen needs a real thorough scrub. Seth first slides out the refrigerator.
Unseen areas are always the worst, and here is no exception,
the linoleum greasy with hair and dust and roach droppings. The first
sweep of the broom exposes a round, white pill. Kneeling, Seth recognizes
the tablet—a dose of Ecstasy—another remnant. He and Matthew
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Men in White
were once into that stuff. It must have dropped out of a bag and rolled
unnoticed beneath the fridge.
An X and an O are stamped on one side, the X braced like a stick
figure in a barrel. They had called this one “hugs and kisses” because everyone
claimed it made you extra touchy-feely, made you want to spend your
whole night dancing with another person, feeling their skin pressed against
yours, their fingers threading along your spine.
There’s no way to know what it will do now. Matthew would, but his
phone has been off since yesterday, and Seth doubts he would answer in
any case. Seth takes a plastic sandwich bag from a drawer beneath the microwave
and drops the pill inside. He puts the bag in his pocket.
For the past two years Seth has worked at Anytime, Anywhere, a company
that processes passport applications for travelers in a hurry. He could
be on a plane to Buenos Aires tomorrow. A year ago, still eager for surprise,
he would be packing a suitcase right now. But he has recently learned to
appreciate the job’s steady tedium. What he regrets is how he never saw this
happening. His husband has left him. His one friend has stopped talking
to him. Rent is due in a week. Things have not come off as Seth intended.
5.
Seth can only read the poster’s title—GWU Fencing Club—floating above
the heads of some guys passing a basketball around in the dorm’s foyer.
A space clears between bodies, and he glimpses the image: two men wearing
fencing whites, facemasks inches apart, and their blades crossed in
an X that slashes the picture corner to corner. Below the picture is a date.
The first meeting of the year is next week.
Not intending to keep up his practice, Seth had purposely left his
épée at home. College promised a new start. But that night he calls his
father and asks him if he can mail the blade. He has it just in time.
When Seth arrives at the clubroom, the space already echoes with
the conversational tock and sing of clashing foils. He watches duelists run
through drills. Lunge and retreat; parry and riposte; disengagement; envelopment.
A young man stands alongside Seth at the door. While most others
bothered to bring only masks, he wears a jacket, knickers, and boots. His
narrow bodysuit is all lines and angles, like a series of sword slashes. He
is Seth’s height.
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Stefen Styrsky
“En garde” Seth salutes him, hilt to chin.
In the club’s monthly bouts, this guy, Ian, soon establishes himself
as their best fencer. Seth has always taken pride in how he can defeat most
opponents with his patience and timing. Against Ian, Seth feels defenseless.
If he steps forward, hoping to get inside Ian’s guard, he’s hit. If he steps
backward, where he thinks he’s out of range, he’s hit. Strategy is useless.
And these are not light scoring taps. Ian’s épée strikes so hard, bows so
deeply, it seems it will break. Because the whole body is a target, Seth
often wakes the next morning with bruises on his thighs and hips the size
of fists.
1.
On Sunday after breakfast, Seth’s mom and dad tell him his new brother
will be named David.
“Do you think it’s a good name” his dad says.
His mom, her stomach fat as a boulder, pushes herself out of her chair.
She starts collecting the dishes.
Seth’s dad wrinkles his mouth. “I can do that,” he says. He takes a
plate out of her hand.
“Things will be okay,” she says.
His dad laughs, and then kisses her forehead.
“Yes, yes,” he says.
Seth smiles at his mom and dad. He can feel something is different. Their
faces no longer tighten when he says he’s hungry; or after a boring day, comes
out of his bedroom with the clattering box of Chutes and Ladders and asks
if they want to play. The sighs that escape them as they make his lunch or
sort his laundry or mop up the muddy footprints he now and then tracks
in the hallway have stopped. His parents laugh and joke, and his dad will
flip Seth the change out of his pockets when he comes home from work.
One day after dismissal, Mrs. Dorset is waiting for him. She tells Seth
his mother is having the baby; that he’ll be staying with her for few days.
She drives him to his house where she packs clothes in a suitcase. A halfeaten
piece of toast lies discarded on the dining table next to a lip-smudged
glass of orange juice.
Mrs. Dorset washes the dishes she finds piled in the sink.
“Help me dry these.” She beckons Seth with a jerk of her head and
holds out a dishtowel.
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Men in White
Seth tries, but he drops a plate. It explodes across the kitchen floor
like a shattered moon.
“Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Dorset says. “Be careful.”
He throws the towel at her and runs into his mom’s room. He climbs
on the bed and shoves his head between the pillows.
“Seth, I’m sorry. You scared me,” Mrs. Dorset says from the doorway.
He’s with the Dorsets two days. His dad calls. “Things will be all
right,” he says. His voice is raspy and dry, the way someone sounds when
they need a drink of water. Seth can hear the lie. On the third day his
dad takes him home, but his mom is not there.
“Mom needs to stay in the hospital a little longer,” Seth’s dad says.
When his dad starts crying, Seth panics. He’s never seen his father
cry, and he wants to crawl away, hide under the dining table, where he
can be safe.
“She’s very sad,” his dad says.
Seth gets used to his mom not being home. At first, Mrs. Dorset stays
with him after school. Then she stops, and Seth lets himself in when the
bus drops him off. He watches TV and leaves his snack plates in the living
room. By the time his dad cleans up each Saturday, drippings of jelly
and peanut butter have mortared the plates together. When Seth’s mom
does come home, she is different. She has no belly and her black hair is
very short.
9.
“Let’s go,” Seth says. “Let’s get married.”
He and Matthew are on the couch watching TV, Matthew’s head in
Seth’s lap. The screen shows men and men, women and women, standing
together while the mayor of San Francisco marries them. They are
dressed every which way. Some wear suits and white dresses, others are
in jeans and T-shirts as if they ran downtown as soon as they heard the
news.
“We need rings,” Matthew says, his trim beard rubbing softly against
Seth’s thigh.
They have lived together for three years. They met rolling on Ecstasy
at the party of a mutual friend. After their dealer was arrested, the
circuit Seth and Matthew knew broke up. The two of them paired off in
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Stefen Styrsky
Seth’s basement apartment where they could huddle nights in front of
the blue TV and hope they weren’t next. They survived. When they
emerged their mutual friend was dead, stabbed by a meth-addled escort.
The few other guys they knew were out west in rehab or just gone.
They argue after purchasing plane tickets. Matthew shows Seth photographs
printed from the Internet. Faces of boys and girls available for
adoption. Matthew grew up with two brothers and a sister. “I want continuity,”
he says. “I want lots of hugs.”
Like most discussions on the subject, this one is rehearsed, and Seth
watches himself take his familiar stance, his familiar role of placating
Matthew.
“We’re young. Can’t we wait” Seth says.
Which is Seth’s way of avoiding the truth—he doesn’t want to adopt.
He has plans. He has a life. They don’t include a child.
Seth hates fighting. His mom and dad went at each other like screeching
birds. They seemed trapped in old resentments, old injuries. After
the really bad fights his mom would check herself into a hospital.
Right before his parents divorced, Seth’s mom was at Miami Mercy.
He had to take a bus and then the Metro to get out there. On the weekends
his dad drove him.
“You understand, it’s not that I don’t want to see her,” his dad said.
“She won’t let me.”
“Why aren’t you talking to dad” Seth asked his mom.
“Something is missing in him.” Her back towards Seth, she
scratched at the translucent contact paper blurring the windows in the
common room. Apparently sunlight was okay for the patients, but not
an unadulterated look at the parking lot. Seth didn’t understand why, if
she was so eager to get in here, she now wanted a clear view out.
“He has no sense of adventure,” she said. “He’s a stone.”
Seth and Matthew go back and forth. Instead of trying for a win, Seth
takes a draw. “I’m not saying no. I just want to wait.”
Seth knows how to avoid arguments.
6.
There is pleasure sparring with an opponent who is your equal, but not
quite. Seth fences Kyle, the club’s latest member. Though Kyle is good,
Seth uses his longer reach to score more often. His height has always been
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Men in White
an advantage. His blade extends farther. His lunge crosses more distance
and strikes opponents before they are close. He’s not a giant; he just has
a couple inches on most people.
Kyle is a theatre major. Traditional drama—Marlowe, Shakespeare—has
always required knowledge of fencing. “We could use extras
who can handle a foil,” he says to Seth. “For the battle scenes.” He
invites Seth for a beer so they can talk about arranging his first stage appearance.
They stand at the bar, and the alcohol helps Seth calm down. He can’t
decide if Kyle is friendly or flirting. Kyle is a toucher. His fingers and hands
punctuate conversation, a warm palm or pinkie tap emphasizing points
on Seth’s body. Repeated slaps against Seth’s shoulder could be affectionate,
beery raps or a feint to judge his reactions. Should he touch back The
place doesn’t seem like one where a lingering pause between two guys
would go over in the best way.
“You’re good,” Kyle says. “Did you ever think of competing”
“Not good enough. Wait until you meet Ian,” Seth says.
Kyle lays a palm on Seth’s chest over the heart. “You’re a big target.
It’s the only reason I had a chance.”
“A good feint helps,” Seth says. Kyle could flick his foil downward
at the last second and slip underneath Seth’s guard.
Later that week when Seth shows up at the rehearsal of Hamlet, Kyle
introduces Jennifer, his girlfriend. Seth hopes his disappointment isn’t
evident. Judging reactions, no one notices his forced smile when he shakes
Jennifer’s hand.
3.
It’s Saturday. Seth’s mom spends the day watching television. Sometimes
she wheels the set onto the screened porch. Most often she sits in the living
room, a duvet around her legs, and working the remote, thrusting
the device with each tap of a button, stabbing it at the TV.
In the afternoon a thunderstorm rises from the west. Clouds darken
the sky and douse the world in sheets of water, forcing Seth inside.
“Watch ‘Robin Hood’ with me,” his mother says. “It was your grandfather’s
favorite movie.”
Though first impatient with the dull black and white, Seth soon forgets
the lack of color and follows the story. A duel on a castle’s circular
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Stefen Styrsky
staircase convinces him: he wants to learn how to use a sword.
Later, in the long, damp evening, Seth goes outside to swing a stick
at King John’s invisible guardsmen. He batters a pine tree. He performs
lunge after lunge against the trunk. The point of his stick gouges the bark,
drawing sap to the surface.
He turns to confront an assassin sneaking up behind him. His mother
stands on the porch. She has seen the whole thing, and Seth drops his
excitement, embarrassed.
“Inside,” she says.
She emerges from her bedroom holding a steel rod. She has never
hit him, but he fears it now. He trembles and refuses to cry.
“This was your grandfather’s.” His mother offers Seth the leather
grip. He realizes with relief and thrill—it is a sword. A silver, shaft-oflight-thin
sword.
The bowl-guard swallows his hand. The blade is light, and a steel
marble blunts the point, but it is a sword. Seth timidly tries a swing.
“Someday I will let you have it,” she says. “If you take lessons and
become good enough. Right now, it’s still your grandfather’s épée.”
Of course, Seth doesn’t listen. Times when his mother is at the doctor’s
office or napping on the couch, he takes the sword out of her closet.
He enjoys swinging the blade, hearing the whirling trail it cuts through
the air. The day his mother catches him, she grabs the épée and swats
him three times across the back of the thighs, the blows like lightning.
For a while after Seth can only sit on the edges of chairs.
A teacher at school asks him what’s wrong.
“I fell off my bike,” he says.
8.
Seth, on a pill run before he and Matthew go dancing, waits outside his
dealer’s apartment. He’s knocked twice. The only response has been the
TV skipping through channels and silhouetted feet darting past the door’s
bottom seam. He knocks again. He waits. Finally, the door opens on a
sliver of pale light. A hand beckons him inside.
His eyes have to adjust to the room, dapple-lit only by the television’s
flicker. Deadbolts and a security chain rattle back into place.
There is a third person here.
Ian lies shirtless on the couch. The remote dangles loosely from his
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Men in White
fingers. Pictures change on the TV: the president, a weather map, a car
chase. There is a bubbling river, a jet engine, a laugh track.
Seth last saw Ian two years ago at the White Party, shirtless then too,
and dancing alone underneath the disco ball. Seth had waved, but Ian only
stared, rolling hard, the strobe lights glazing his eyes.
He wouldn’t let anyone touch him. Displayed as he was, lots of men
tried. Even Seth had reached for a quick brush of fingertips on Ian’s tight
waist. Ian spun and dodged, hips shifting just before he slid out of reach.
“Been a while,” Ian says.
“Ian,” Seth says, then pauses. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
Though he remains a long stripe of muscle, Ian appears to have lost
some essential buoyancy. It could be a trick of the flashing screen. Shadows
etch his chest and stomach, illuminated planes in the TV’s light. The
effect makes him seem stretched, taut, the way a person looks when they
carry something heavy.
Their pill man walks in from the kitchen. “I’m in a good mood,” the
guy says. “Have one on the house.”
He taps out a pill onto Seth’s palm. “They’re new. Hugs and kisses.”
The guy kneels and dangles a white pip over Ian. His head titled back,
Ian catches the tablet on his tongue. The guy then spreads a hand on Ian’s
naked stomach.
When Seth and Matthew hit the dance floor, Seth takes off his shirt.
He won’t let Matthew, or anyone, near him for a long while. He dances
like a sword fighter, precise and untouchable.
10.
Jennifer and Kyle throw a bachelor party for Seth at Kyle’s apartment.
A few friends from work are there: three members of the fencing club,
a woman who lives down the hall from Seth and who has befriended him
this last year. They drink red wine out of highball glasses.
Kyle, as usual, takes the center of attention. “We decided I’d be the
stripper,” he says. The eyebrow he conspiringly raises at Seth makes it
plain he’s just fine that men find him attractive. He is an equal-opportunity
flirt.
Seth believes the desire goes one way. Though, there are moments.
The time Seth had helped Kyle rehearse his lines for a part in Coriolanus,
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Stefen Styrsky
Kyle had said before they started, “I’ll warn you. At the end we’re supposed
to make out.” A joke, of course. The smile on his face then was
the same smile he wears tonight. A smile that dared Seth: show your feelings;
show how much you want me. But Kyle had met his match. Seth
knows how to hold things inside, how to hold a face that shows nothing.
“My hope is one marriage inspires another,” Jennifer says.
She takes Seth’s hand and holds it up so Kyle, over at the cheese tray,
can see the ring on Seth’s finger. Kyle recites at her: “We defy augury.
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”
“Never date an actor,” she says to Seth.
“Jealousy always makes a relationship stronger,” Seth says. He sets
his drink down and guides Jennifer to the room’s center.
“Turn it up,” he says, and someone obliges. A bossa nova saxophone
swallows conversation.
Seth dances with Jennifer, knowing everyone will watch and notice
Jennifer’s calves, shapely as champagne flutes. He places a hand on the
small of her back, and Jennifer’s hands are soon warm on his hip and shoulder.
When Seth rolls their waists together, he looks for Kyle.
Kyle raises his glass and toasts Seth with a nod and his perpetual goodsport
expression. Is everything like that to him Seth wonders. Simply
another fun time, an experience saved for later, fond recollection.
After the party, Kyle drives Seth to the Metro station.
“She’s a good dancer,” Kyle says. He chews mint gum in case there
are police. “I think I fell in love with her the first time we danced.”
It occurs to Seth he fell in love with Matthew when he proposed. Until
then, he suspected they stayed together because each was a link for
the other between two phases of life. Cut the chain and both would unravel.
He needs Matthew to prove he’s more than just separate incidents.
“I like it out here,” Seth says.
“Snooze town.” Kyle works the gearshift. His white jeans jump below
the steering wheel. “Jennifer and I are moving to the city as soon as
she gets her Master’s.”
The station parking lot is empty. There is only the attendant, a distant
silhouette in his illuminated kiosk. Kyle and Seth get out and stand
facing each other in the car’s headlights.
“Take care,” Kyle says.
They hug. Seth feels Kyle’s ribs and the broad muscles running across
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Men in White
his back, and senses, or imagines, Kyle’s stomach and waist. Their knees
touch.
Kyle kisses Seth, and Seth does not pull away. He should. He should
say, “Whoa, dude, you’re drunk,” but he doesn’t. There is the taste of
wine and mint. After a moment they part. How far does Kyle intend to
go How far would he let it go before turning it into a joke the way he
does with everything
Kyle winks and drives off.
7.
Seth cuts Ian’s photograph from the Post. The headline reads: En Garde!
Sander Wins AFA Title. The article’s more a profile of Ian than a sports
piece and appears in the Style section. There’s a brief description of
his victory at the collegiate championships this spring in Jackson,
Wyoming, and a primer on the differences between foil, saber and épée;
how a point is scored; how many points are required to win. There is also
a note that Ian plans to try out for the Olympic team after graduation.
The article quotes Dimitri Tepp, Olympic fencing gold-medal winner,
now the coach for Yale: “Sander’s speed and timing are the best I’ve
seen in thirty-four years.”
Halfway down the text at the fold, Ian, Kyle, and Seth pose shoulder
to shoulder in a photograph, dressed in white jackets, foils held at
their hips like walking sticks. Kyle and Seth are listed as training partners.
Seth is grateful the caption editor resisted a crack about the three
musketeers.
A knock at the apartment door. A grinning and wobbly Ian lets himself
in. “I took a pill. Let’s go out.”
“Not tonight,” Seth says.
Ian steadies himself with a hand on Seth’s shoulder. “I’m famous and
I want to celebrate.”
Seth watches Ian’s shifting feet. Nothing he says will make a difference.
The familiar arguments for staying in--homework, poverty, fatigue–
Ian always dismisses with a hand wave. Seth knows he will eventually relent.
He paddles along in Ian’s wake simply because Ian is beautiful.
“We celebrated,” Seth says.
“That’s before I was in the paper.” Ian’s legs shake, and he sits on the
floor.
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Stefen Styrsky
“Ian, you’re going to hurt yourself.”
He makes a fart noise with his lips. “Hardly. How bombed was I at
the championship” he says.
“I think everyone was surprised you could walk,” Seth says.
“And I went on to what” He wags a finger at Seth. “Not lose, but
what”
Seth has never seen Ian from this vantage. His legs are piled beneath
him, forgotten, and he clings upright to Seth’s calf.
“I’ll tell you,” Ian says. “I went on to win three straight.”
“You need to get a hold of yourself,” Seth says.
Ian cups his crotch and laughs. “All I need is a bump,” he says. “A
little crystal fixes anything.”
“You used at the championship” Seth asks. He’d no idea Ian had started
that far back. This should trouble him, but instead Seth notices Ian’s
mouth is at just the right level. It would be so easy to unzip his pants.
A friend on the edge and all he wants is a blowjob. Seth considers
stabbing the scissors into his thigh.
“Give me a few minutes,” he says.
He puts the newspaper clipping in a manila folder where he keeps
other items that form a random catalog of his life: immunization records,
a U.S. savings bond, his mother’s obituary.
For once Ian buys drinks. During the third round of vodka-cranberries,
his eyelids start to droop and then his head hangs forward.
He shakes himself awake and says he has to see a friend in the restroom.
When Ian returns, sweat beads his forehead, a leer exposes teeth.
“Tina,” he says. “The queen of drugs.”
He is such a wreck, Seth thinks. He’ll never make it at this rate. Years
later, when Seth remembers this night, he realizes it was one of the few
times he knew what came next.
4.
Seth and his mom hug goodbye at the nurse’s station. He reels, suddenly
aware he towers over the bony, trembling woman in his arms. She was
never tall. His height comes from his dad. But even when he outgrew his
mom, Seth still always believed he was shorter.
The floor seems far away, his head a balloon near the ceiling. His
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Men in White
eyes roll with vertigo, and he utters a low, nauseated moan. Seth steps
back still clutching his mom’s shoulder.
“You are so much like your father,” she says.
12.
Kyle has a shaved crotch. He tells Seth it’s so he looks bigger. Seth tries
imagining the dark patch but only succeeds in comparing Kyle to an overdeveloped
twelve-year old.
They meet on Thursday evenings, sometimes on Saturday afternoons,
for what they tell Jennifer and Matthew is fencing practice. They take a room
at the hotel near Rhode Island and 14th Street that charges by the hour.
Kyle likes to be worshipped. He likes Seth kneeling in front of him
on the tread-flattened carpet, his hands running through Seth’s hair. He
likes Seth’s thumbs on his nipples, Seth’s tongue probing the fold of skin
running down bicep and shoulder into armpit.
They play a game. “Discobolous,” Seth announces, and Kyle poses halfcrouched,
one arm pointed at the stained ceiling, the other curved in front
of him. He has the famous statue’s heavy, muscular waist, and his missing
pubic hair makes the resemblance even stronger. They run the gamut:
Farnese Hercules, the archer, Dying Gaul.
Their touch, when it comes, is a shock of pleasurable, alien heat. Seth
doesn’t wish he was without Matthew. He wishes each time he and
Matthew made love it was with that surprise felt by first-time lovers. Kyle’s
body is still new. If Seth could forget what it was like with Matthew, only
to return to him each night, he would be happy.
11.
The phone call in the middle of the night. Seth answers and Ian is on the
line.
“I can’t leave unless someone picks me up,” Ian says. “Because of the
police.”
His words are mushy. Seth can tell he speaks with his lips against the
handset, an attempt at privacy in an open space.
“They have my apartment bugged,” Ian says.
He babbles about detectives and listening devices and hidden cameras.
Somehow amid all the rambling, Seth learns Ian is in the psychiatric
ward at George Washington University hospital.
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“Fine, I’ll come,” Seth says. “Give me your codeword.” Next to him
Matthew sits up in the semi-dark. His eyes are closed.
“Sword,” Ian says, and clicks off.
“What is it now” Matthew says.
Seth gets out of bed. He kicks at the shoes in the closet, hoping to
make out his by their shape. He wants the light off. “Ian’s in the hospital.”
“He’s not your friend,” Matthew says.
“He’s mine,” Seth says.
Sheets rustle. Matthew gropes for the extra blanket. “He takes you
for granted,” Matthew says.
This is Seth’s first time at GWU hospital, but he navigates it with
an ease built on experience. Signs near the elevator direct him to the Behavior
Unit on the sixth floor. At a metal fire-door Seth shouts “sword”
through an intercom. Locks click and the door swings open. He’s where
he belongs.
Behind safety glass sit two women in green hospital smocks. A bald
doctor dressed in similar green clothing meets Seth in the hallway. He
had expected men in white.
“The paranoia is from lack of sleep,” the doctor says.
“He hasn’t slept” Seth asks.
“A shot of thorazine barely slowed him down,” he says.
The doctor waves Seth into the dining area. Ian sits alone, working
at a food tray with a plastic fork. He is shapeless in a hospital gown. His
crossed legs reveal the bottom of one foot and the rubber, non-slip tread
of an institutional sock.
When Seth appears at his side, Ian’s eyes widen, fear and confusion
all over his face. Seth can tell Ian recognizes him but doesn’t know who
he is.
“Are the police here” Ian says.
“There are no police,” Seth says.
Ian loses the glare of panic and goes back to the pastrami sandwich
on his tray.
Seth wonders how long it’s been since Ian has eaten. He looks starved.
His jaw is sharp, an edge of stone. And his face has collapsed into itself,
leaving behind only debris: cheekbones, nose, and chin. Remnants of the
person he once was.
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Men in White
“Did you call your parents” Seth says.
“They’ve cut me off.” Ian jams a forkful of meat and sourdough into
his mouth. “It’s their goddamn therapist,” he says through the goopy wad.
“She tells them all this crap about me. She doesn’t know shit.”
“Everyone has patterns,” Seth says, surprised he actually believes it.
Ian swallows. “I couldn’t take it,” he says. “There’s a guy in group
who won’t shut up. He’s eighty years old and starts every meeting, ‘My
last drink was on June 5th, 1972 at 11:13 AM. I have been sober for fortysix
years.’ He then unrolls this litany of everything, everything, that has
happened to him since.”
Ian chews and swallows again. He peels open a plastic tub of applesauce.
“He is so boring. This last time he made me want the longest, fattest
line in the world.”
2.
Photographs are important to Seth’s mom. After she and his dad fight
or she comes home from the hospital, his mom hauls out the fat albums
and flips through the crinkly pages.
Today she has Seth sit next to her on the couch. Her eyes are red.
When she leans forward her long hair shuts around her face in a black
curtain and she has to keep hooking it behind her ears.
“This is you as a baby,” she says. “Here is your dad and me when we
got married. This is where we lived after you were born.” Her fingernails
are short and bear flecks of blue polish. “This is the house I grew
up in.”
She smiles at happy pictures, cries if a person in one is no longer alive,
jabbers excitedly at a photo of herself on a horse. Pictures of Seth’s father
do not provoke her the way his presence seems a cause for arguments.
Each square is a universe alone.
Today she installs photographs onto an album’s blank pages. She peels
back the cellophane sheath, and Seth lays the rectangles on the sticky backing.
Most photos are black and white. Many are old, curled or creased.
He recognizes young aunts and uncles; puzzles over strangers who might
become a known face if studied long enough.
“Here’s one I love.” His mom holds a picture of a man dressed in a
white jacket and pants.
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Stefen Styrsky
Who is that Seth wants to ask.
“He was before I knew your father.” Seth’s mom hesitates. Her eyes
focus somewhere beyond the glossy paper in her hand. She then holds
the photo out for Seth. “Your grandfather was his fencing coach at Yale.”
The man’s hair is shiny and slicked back. He holds a foil in one hand,
and a wire mask is tucked underneath the opposite arm. His white jacket
bears a heart-shaped target patch. Seth wonders if the patch was red.
In the picture, it is a dark space on the right.
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Fire Season
Carolyne Wright
Temecula, California
The cats roll for hours in the dust.
They stalk us, fur matted,
eyes green with evasion.
Your first letter to me
comes from Paradise, the home
of an old lover. Sting of ash grit
stronger than black sage off the desert,
the Santa Ana winds driving us
like reluctant fighters into each other’s thoughts.
Trust, you write, a double line
under the word as if you can scarcely
believe it. Fire’s still in the air.
Mid-afternoon: the first gray flakes
through scrub junipers, phalanxes of flame
in the ironwood. Not everything’s resolved.
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Carolyne Wright
I’m keeping my options open, fingers
crossed. I’m tired of such confusion
in my life, this running from myself
and all that jive. Do I believe
your letter Where there’s smoke
there’s fire: my own thoughts
tremble, flashes under the skin
the answer I never mail means
to signify: we can’t be surrogates
for anyone. Not the old lover
who gives you cash for the road, though the road
out of Paradise leads to another woman—
into chaparral hills where I squat naked
on flagstones by the cabin, touching myself
as you did, in that narrow bed all winter
on the other coast. "I’m tired of running,"
you murmur as you close my door. Your hands
under my dress are fearless as ever.
Blue-shadowed labyrinths of our desire
turn once again in our favor.
We make love, our bodies dream-slow
in the stunned air, the room deep
as a cistern. Our tongues lingering
in each other’s mouths, we go where
words conceal themselves, coral adders
curled in pine slash by the cabin door. Sulfur
and potash homestead on our eyelids,
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Fire Season
we ignore the chopper blades, evacuation
warnings. Outside, the winds rise,
live oaks flail their arms like men
trying to beat out the sun,
your hands draw their conclusions
on my skin. Centripetal rings of fire
close on the ridge beyond Far Spring,
rescue planes circle the wrong canyons,
our different bodies not quite giving us away.
Strange how the afternoon’s dry ache
makes good its claim, like deer
that linger too long in the clearing.
The loyalty I ask for slithers like flame
through your practiced hands. You enter me,
and I empty my thighs of wisdom.
92

The Broken Leg
Amanda Moore
Eventually it comes between us:
not the plaster barricade
between every tender moment we might have,
but the dependence.
After the flurry of surgeons and worry of permanent damage
there is the carrying of urine, changing of bandages,
the creak of crutches and incessant talk of scabs.
Like a shabby patch of grass I am stretched out beneath him,
trampled and benignly offering servitude: not the meal or the pillow,
the TV or the bed or the Vicodin, but the nagging truth
behind it all.
In short, it’s unromantic,
this child in the shape of my husband,
this outstretched hand, rumpled head and hungry mouth.
And the bright side Well, talk to me another day.
For now it is logistics and medicine, car pools
and take-out pizza, not laughing
while he climbs the stairs on his butt.
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The Broken Leg
And it’s the weight of one house,
its dishes and litter and dust on my shoulders.
Then there is the moment
we look across the bed at one another,
mangled leg between us like a sleeping child,
and understand this is what it will one day be like:
a wheel chair, a diaper, a walker or forgetting
and then a kind of solitude.
This is what the broken leg has brought us: a glimpse
of the way life will take us to our knees
before we leave it. I want to say
thanks a lot.
It’s hard enough some days
to drag myself from bed, tired pilgrim
limping toward the impossible grotto of happiness,
without it tangibly beside me,
a reminder of my body’s
tremendous capacity for decay.
And did I mention the servitude How I proffer it
tenderly and resentfully at once, each day
a new opportunity to fail him.
Still, I don’t despise that bike that broke his leg
and dragged us to the knowing. At night
when I replay in dreams the afternoon
that flipped us both to the curb, sick wail of ambulance
and everything that followed, I don’t always say
Stop. Don’t be a jackass. You don’t know what this will do to us.
Sometimes I say Go faster. Let me see that trick you do again.
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And Not to Have is the Beginning of
Desire
Elizabeth Oness
Every fall Eleanor watches the new graduate students arrive. They hurry
over the freshly waxed floors with no thought of the summer quiet
their chattering presence has destroyed. The doctoral students she privately
lays bets on: some will finish; some will drop out or have nervous
breakdowns; some will become so peculiar they can’t function. The poets
and fiction writers are the most friendly and quickly develop their own
hierarchy––the anointed, the hopeful, the thrilled-to-have-gotten-in. Otto
and Katherine, famously married poets, were hired to attract talented students,
and now the students arrive from all over the country with their
tablets and laptops; sleek, electronic receptacles of their aesthetic connection
to the larger world.
Eleanor is in charge of giving them desks and juggling their teaching
assignments. Sometimes she pairs new students with older students;
sometimes she puts all the newbies together. She never pairs two
African-American students because that seems isolating, although she
sometimes puts two lesbians together or two women who might be,
not figuring they will become romantic partners, but that they will
take comfort in each other’s presence. She never pairs two attractive
straight people of the opposite sex. They have enough proximity, fuck
like rabbits as far as she can tell, and she doesn’t want anyone weeptahoma
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And Not to Have is the Beginning of Desire
ing in her office about not wanting to share a desk with so and so anymore.
Every year the hopeful wave comes in, shining and eager, but by the
following year, especially among the poets, the tide turns. Over the past
few years the pattern has become clear, and she’s afraid that the cycle of
favorites and discards will erupt in violence: among the poets themselves,
toward Otto and Katherine, she can’t say for sure. If she tried to explain
it to an outsider, it would seem petty—crabs in a barrel, climbing over
one another for recognition—but even the least talented students write
their guts out, and the way that Otto and Katherine play them off against
each other becomes more precise and cruel each year. Every spring, as
sure the wax fades from the floors, the gloss comes off the poets and their
happiness, and something dark and hurtful sets in.
I can only tell you part of this story. I can tell you the hidden part, the
part between us, the part everyone wanted to know. Did we sleep together
Did she let me... I stood outside her usual sphere. I was not a poet, not
a writer, not a man. When I try to arrive at some version of the truth, I
have two perspectives, both limited. I can see all of them: Otto and Katherine,
their circle of students, as if looking through a telescope the wrong
way, and from that distanced viewpoint, the glamour and mystery and
excitement of the group is dissipated by their smallness. Then, as if the
telescope were turned around, I can see Marina, the claret curve of her
lip, her slender neck, the way she smiles at someone outside the circle
of magnified light.
Francoise pours a glass of wine and sets it down on her copy of Bataille’s
Eroticism, Death and Sexuality. Otto told her he would look at the proposal
for her dissertation one last time. In the last proposal she submitted,
Otto, in his impeccable French, picked apart a phrase in Dalwood’s
translation, a phrase that Francoise had used to underpin her argument
and then proceeded to undermine her entire thesis. She lifts the glass to
her mouth. Every time she goes to his office, standing outside his closed
door, she feels a frisson of expectation, although now she can hardly remember
what is imagined and what was real.
She stood in front of his bookcase, a wall of books stretching to the
ceiling. Even the titles seemed sexy, portentous, although he discussed
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Elizabeth Oness
them with the distanced air of one for whom everything was theoretical.
He searched for a book she must read. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse.
He stood to get it from the shelf. Touching the rows of slender spines,
she rose to meet him. She stood in a light summer dress, legs slightly apart,
a challenge; he reached down and, ever so slowly, slid a finger up the inside
of her thigh. The lightness of it, the anticipation, made her wet.
“Kneel,” he said softly. And she knelt.
I’m an orphan. Melodramatic, perhaps, but my whole life is inscribed by
a loss that has already occurred.
A high school social studies teacher and his wife adopted me as an
infant. Imagine neatly mowed lawns, laundry airing in the sun, a metal
swing set. The family photos, bourgeois and domestic, make it seem as
if I belong, but it’s all atmosphere and inference. I was a skinny girl with
dirt-stained knees, deeply tanned from spending hours poking at
anthills, unfeminine from the start. To my adoptive family’s credit, they
never tried to make me into anything I was not. When I started playing
basketball, my father encouraged me to go out for the team. In high school,
I developed a consuming crush on a local tennis player. My mother listened
to my swooning admiration for months, then signed me up for tennis
lessons at the local swim and tennis club.
I want to say that Marina was my guide to the world of poetry and
literature, but I grew up with books, filled with the knowledge of a world
below everyday surfaces, a world that language made real. I spent long
stretches of my adolescence huddled over a novel, and whenever I started
a new book, I had the feeling I was venturing not into a world, but
into the world—a place of complexity and richness below the shopping
mall life that surrounded me.
I was finishing a doctorate in Archeology when I met Marina. I had
always been the seducer, and then I was seduced. Early on, she loaned
me a translation of Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. I took this as a sign; I should
have seen it was a warning.
Taut skin, fresh voices. Francoise can’t stand one more year of watching
the bright young things, can’t stand watching the way they bloom under
Otto and Katherine’s attention. If she tried to tell them that everything
was not as it seemed, they wouldn’t believe her. They would think,
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And Not to Have is the Beginning of Desire
she’s mediocre, or she’s jealous, or she’s old. It would be pathetic to explain
that she had once been the object of desire. She has been here too long.
Otto keeps her endlessly revising the proposal for her dissertation. He
explains, in the most reasonable tone, that clearly defining her ideas will
save her time and energy, but she has turned in eleven drafts of her proposal,
and each time he finds some subtle point to criticize, then collapses
her whole castle of cards. She sips her wine and opens her desk drawer
to look at the pistol. It’s a lady’s piece with pearl inlay on the handle, a
slender barrel, late nineteenth century. The antiques dealer assured her
it would still work.
Otto and Katherine walk into the English office together––cheeks flushed,
coats open, satchels over their shoulders––like adventurers from afar. They
conduct themselves with a willed youthfulness, although Katherine has
cut her hair in a middle-aged bob, and Otto’s dark hair is thinning.
“Hi, Eleanor.” Katherine smiles as if something amusing has just happened.
As she and Otto stand at the mailboxes, gathering their mail, Otto
leans into her to say something sotto voce. Katherine laughs.
Otto turns, as if remembering they’re in the presence of others.
“Eleanor, if I give you something to scan could you take care of it this
morning”
“Sure, Otto. No problem.” Eleanor understands the masquerade now,
although it still feels awkward. His voice, warm and courteous, is a mask
for his polite withdrawal. When she first arrived, he had asked why she
was working as a secretary, as if it were clear that this work was too pedestrian
for her abilities. Noticing her interest in Shakespeare, he had praised
her intelligence and taste. He left her little notes. Privately, he called her
Portia. He never touched her.
The first time he called from his office upstairs, Eleanor was surprised,
imagining he wanted some administrative task dispatched. Instead he said,
“Let me read you something,” and he read a quote from Wallace Stevens,
one she didn’t completely understand.
Sometimes he called to ask her advice about something he could have
easily decided for himself. When the office was empty, she would tell him
a funny anecdote from her day, and his voice, full of intelligence and humor,
encouraged her, as if she were fleshing out an idea that had previously
been abstract to him. One afternoon, they’d been laughing on the
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Elizabeth Oness
phone, now she can’t remember at what, and Katherine had walked into
the English office. Hearing Eleanor’s laughter, Katherine stiffened.
“Don’t imagine I don’t know what’s going on,” Katherine hissed. The
lines around her mouth, deepened by anger, made her face an angry mask.
Grabbing a sheaf of papers from her mailbox, she hurried out of the office.
Francoise opens her purse, puts the pistol inside, and snaps the clasp. She’s
meeting Otto at noon and wants to know at least one thing he doesn’t.
He’s always a step ahead. Like Orpheus, he turns to see her and sends
her back to the shadowy dark. He’s had the latest draft of her proposal
for a week; all he has to do is approve it so she can begin writing her dissertation.
Walking toward campus, Francoise picks her way around the puddles.
The smell of exhaust, wet branches, and coffee wafts through the
air. Her red cowboy boots make her feel younger, a little saucy, although
the feeling fades when she sees Marina coming out of a café near the university.
She’s accompanied by a woman, a grad student from another department,
and rumors have floated through the overheated air of the graduate
program. The woman’s long face and high forehead give the impression
of intelligence, as if she is not to be denied. She wears motorcycle
boots, jeans, a scuffed leather jacket; her brown hair falls to her shoulders.
Marina stops so the woman can light a cigarette, and she half-turns,
shielding the flame from the wind. Francoise can see how it will end—
the intense brown-haired woman, her cheeks pocked with acne scars, holding
her cigarette like a man—she’ll end up with her heart in a blender.
Marina smiles at something the woman says and reaches into her coat
pocket, like a child fishing for a treat.
Orphan, Orfée, Orpheus. I want to be Orpheus, but I have no song. The
first time I saw Marina, I should have guessed she was a poet: sitting in
a café with a clutch of laughing grad students. Laughing instead of baring
their teeth. I didn’t fully understand the competitiveness of poets.
I’ve always loved Rilke, who seems tipped toward the angelic, that tall
tree in the ear filtering nascent voices. Rilke, so inept finally, in earthly
matters: marrying Clara, communing with Paula and the angels in his
requiem.
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And Not to Have is the Beginning of Desire
How to describe Marina Lovely, Mediterranean, with deep olive skin
and black hair shining like obsidian, piled loosely on her head, all the more
lovely for the way it slipped from its fastenings. She was slender, small
breasted, and it was obvious that she liked men. She treated them fondly,
like boys, as if her touch were not charged, as if they must bear the
beauty of her presence without responding.
She was charming. It’s a word we don’t use much anymore. She was
beautiful and understood the difficulties her beauty created. She could
be self-deprecating, as if to undercut her beauty, to set others at ease. Later,
I learned that her need to charm came not from assuredness, but from
its absence. Chameleon-like, she didn’t change her looks, or her hair; it
was not a matter of surface. She immersed herself in the intellectual milieu
around her in order to absorb it. She succumbed to the most interesting
people around her.
Francoise walks into the Languages and Literature building, deposits her
books on her desk and goes to the ladies room to smooth out her hair,
which the dampness makes wild, Medusa-like. Her eyeliner has smeared;
the soft skin beneath her eyes is puffy with fine lines. She reaches into
her purse for a Q-tip and runs it under her eyes. On her cheek, a birthmark
that was once pale brown, distinct, has softened to a smudge. She
pulls back her hair and smooths her skirt. The short skirt with cowboy
boots is a nice touch. She’ll be okay.
Climbing the stairs to Otto’s office, her legs feel wobbly. His door
is half-open and, hearing his voice on the phone, she knocks softly. He
beckons her in, gesturing that she should sit in the armchair.
Her proposal is set in the middle of his neatly arranged desk.
“Yes, yes, I understand.” Otto’s voice, calm and deep, sounds weary.
He looks over at Francoise and rolls his eyes, indicating that the person
on the other end is boring him terribly. She feels a flush of hope.
“Yes, J— it’s important,” Otto says, “and we’ll discuss it further, but
I have someone here now, so I must go.” He uses the poet’s first name,
so Francoise will know that this is a famous poet who teaches at Iowa,
that even the sought-after seek him out. He smiles at Francoise, who smiles
back, in spite of herself.
Otto hangs up. “I’m sorry. She does go on, and her concerns always
become metaphysical.” He smiles, conspiratorial, as if to suggest that the
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Elizabeth Oness
poet has become tedious, that Francoise herself wouldn’t fall prey to such
clichés in thinking.
She fishes in her purse for a pen and touches the handle of her pistol;
its smoothness excites her.
Otto picks up her proposal. “This is better. Your thinking is becoming
more clear. But here, on page five,” and he flips through the pages. “If
you’re going to talk about the modern elegy, you need to figure in Ramazani—have
you read him”
“I’ve heard you’re reading him in workshop.”
Otto nods, dodging the reference to the class she’s not allowed to take
this term. “He’s excellent on the ways in which the tonality of the modern
elegy is different from what came before it. Plath and Lowell, well,
he has many different examples, but they don’t idealize the dead. There’s
more anger, more overt hostility, and it’s conveyed in their diction.”
Otto stands up and moves toward her as if he might be reaching for
her, but he’s reaching for a book on the shelf, right behind her shoulder.
As he leans over, the smell of his soap mixes with the scent of leather from
an old coat. He slides the book out from near her ear, like an uncle doing
a magic trick.
“Your section on Cixious is fine, but remember that your own critical
stance has to be consistent.” Otto makes a note on a piece of paper,
as if this is all a simple matter, as if it won’t be weeks of work in yet another
direction. “Jahan Ramazani’s The Poetry of Mourning. If you’re going
to talk about the elegy in the latter part of the twentieth century, you
really must read it.”
Francoise walks downstairs, fighting back tears. This proposal isn’t even
required by the graduate school, but Otto claims it is necessary, and now
he’s sent her back again, as in a board game where her piece gets knocked
back to the beginning.
At the foot of the stairs, the Director of Composition, a reedy man
partial to argyle vests, greets her without seeming to notice her expression.
“Francoise, I was looking for you. Do you have a few minutes”
She follows him down the hall. Rumor has it he’s moved from one
research institution to the next, a step up each time, a poster boy for academic
success. Inside his office, he turns a palm upwards, indicating the
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And Not to Have is the Beginning of Desire
chair opposite his desk. Once she’s seated, he puts his fingertips together,
like a steeple, in front of his nose.
“Francoise, I’m sorry to tell you that we won’t be giving you a teaching
assistantship next year. If it were up to me, I’d give you another year
and simply say that your dissertation must be done by then, but the new
chair has implemented this policy. You’ve been here for eight years, including
the Masters, and it’s a university mandate—after six years in a Ph.D.
Humanities program, a candidate won’t be given additional aid.”
She turns to look out the window and tries to take a deep breath, but
the view becomes blurry with tears. She starts to cry, silently, into her hand.
Tears seep into her palm. She takes a breath. “I’ll have visa problems if
I’m not enrolled in school. I’ll have to go back to Canada, but I’ve been
here for years now. I don’t have any family there, I’ve nothing to go back
to.”
Cautiously, as if she were an unpredictable animal, he comes out from
behind his desk and hands her a tissue. She knows he will be entirely politically
correct; he cannot touch her, but she longs for him to place a hand
on her shoulder or make some small gesture of comfort. She blows her
nose.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “He won’t let me finish. He won’t approve the
proposal for my dissertation.”
“How long have you been working on the proposal”
“More than a year.”
He looks surprised and starts to say something, then draws his eyebrows
together. “Is there someone else who can direct Someone who
might be more in line with your thinking”
“Katherine won’t do it, because she won’t go against Otto. And if I’m
going to write on Twentieth Century poetry, and he’s not on my committee,
how will it look”
He looks at the wall above her head, as if trying to conjure a diplomatic
answer. “I do see the problem,” he says.
Francoise stares at the toes of her boots. She turned forty-three a week
ago. She will never finish her Ph.D., never get a real job, never publish
a book, never have the approval of the one person who matters most. This
morning her boots made her happy, and now they are just pathetic.
It was Marina’s idea to make impressions of our torsos. She’d gotten a
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Elizabeth Oness
tall roll of butcher paper and black water-based paint. Along with me,
there were four other women at her apartment: two art students, Marina
and another poet. Marina pulled her shirt off over her head, and stood
in the middle of the room, naked from the waist up, slender-hipped, considering
the thick black paint. She shivered, her brown nipples growing
erect.
“Someone will have to paint it on me,” she said.
I reached for my glass of wine.
“Who’s going to do me” She smiled, reaching for a paintbrush about
the size of a ruler. She handed it to me. Trembling, I dipped the tip in
the paint then stepped toward her. I touched the delicate skin below her
collarbone. She shivered.
“It’s cold,” she laughed. “I should have let it sit out longer.”
Wet, shaking, I wanted her to myself. I was furious the others were
there. I would linger on her breasts, make her feel what I felt. I dipped
the brush in the paint and reached toward her again.
Later, I would dream it over and over: Marina painting me, the cold
black paint covering my breasts, lingering at my nipples. I woke each time,
aching between my legs, an aching that felt as if it would never be appeased.
Eleanor hears about the painting party later. The gossip filters down
through the poets and fiction writers as everyone tries to imagine it: five
women covering each other in paint, rolling their impressions onto paper
on the floor. How artistic.
When Otto comes in on Wednesday morning, the lavender circles
under his eyes are darker.
He takes papers from his mailbox, checks them carefully, then tucks
them under his arm.
“Hello, Eleanor, how are you”
“I’m fine, Otto.” It’s as if she’s running lines for a play, their words
spoken with only a semblance of emotion. She hands him his messages
and reminds him of a few departmental details.
When Katherine comes in, she’s wearing a long skirt with a slit in
the side, and through the slit, Eleanor glimpses pale goose-bumped flesh
above the knee. Knee socks. Katherine isn’t usually so inept.
“Eleanor, you haven’t heard from Marina, have you”
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And Not to Have is the Beginning of Desire
“No. Why do you ask”
“We were supposed to have lunch today, but she left a note here.”
Katherine studies a small note from her mailbox, as if trying to decode
a message that isn’t there.
“As far as I know, she’s been showing up to teach her classes. I haven’t
had any complaints,” Eleanor says.
Francoise opens the freezer and takes out a bottle of Absolut. She pours
herself an inch or two in a tumbler, sets the bottle on the counter, and
wanders into the living room.
She sips the cold vodka––such purity, such power in clear fluid. It
always does what it’s supposed to do. She had believed she would finish,
get a job, move away, but now it’s clear that it won’t happen. The job market
is impossible. Even the bright young things get jobs with heavy teaching
loads: four classes a semester, or jobs at community colleges. She will
never even have that.
She glances at an old note from Otto, the familiar handwriting that
has annotated so many of her poems. When she was younger, she wanted
to be a painter, but painting was too abstract; it didn’t render what she
truly wanted to say, and so she turned to poetry. Otto told her that her
vision was rare; he encouraged her––and then he withdrew. She still doesn’t
know if this is because he decided he’d misjudged, that she really isn’t
talented, or if he considers her capable, like a parent letting go of a
bicycle so she will know she can ride by herself.
Ramazani, The Poetry of Mourning. They’re reading it in Otto’s workshop
this semester. Last year, oh, she hates to remember, she went to class
when she’d been drinking. She didn’t mean to. She’d gone out to eat before
class, met up with a friend, and they’d ordered wine, and never gotten
around to the food. At the break, Otto asked her to leave, and the
following semester, when she tried to sign up for the graduate poetry workshop,
Otto told her that she had taken enough workshops, that she should
concentrate on her proposal so she could get to work on her dissertation.
His class meets on Tuesday nights. All week, the graduate students
read the assigned poems and essays over their morning coffee, mulling
their work as caffeine fans their energy. Each term, Otto chooses a particular
theme, bringing together poems and essays from a wide variety
of sources, and the brilliance of his seminars is that he’s truly widely read
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Elizabeth Oness
and humble before the art that precedes him. He encourages the students
to think of themselves as part of an artistic lineage. His class makes everyone
resonate at a higher frequency. Katherine says that when she teaches
the graduate workshop the following semester, she reaps the benefit
of Otto’s teaching because the students turn in amazing poems in the aftermath
of his class. Francoise imagines this is true, but she’s been set adrift.
In the beginning, I saw Otto and Katherine through the lens of Marina’s
admiration. I thought of them as fascinating teachers. It wasn’t until
later that I understood our affair had been an entertainment, a matter
of sexual speculation. Marina’s absence from their circle, the days she
spent with me, provided an erotic study because, together, sipping on their
coffees, they knew that I would fail to hold her.
Francoise pours herself more vodka and adds ice. Everyone will be getting
ready for class, the class to which she has been disinvited, the class
that the beautiful Marina reigns over.
She sets her tumbler on the floor, grabs her coat and purse, and walks
out of the house, leaving the door half-open behind her.
She lives only a few blocks from campus. The slush has frozen in unexpected
places, and she starts to slip, but catches herself on a parking
meter, the thick nub bumping her breastbone.
The stars blur. It’s maybe a half hour before class, the class she can
no longer attend. She yanks on the door to the Languages and Literature
building. Dark. No one is here yet. She climbs the steps to Otto’s
office and sees a light under his door. He is preparing for class, communing
with the angels. She knocks lightly, then walks in without waiting for a
response.
Otto is seated at his desk. His round cheeks are mottled, his expression
haggard. Closing the door behind her, she leans against it. The room feels
small; the windows tremble. She pulls the pistol from her purse and points
it at Otto’s heart.
“Francoise, what’s happened” Sweat rises on his forehead, transparent
dots like tiny domes. She’s never seen him sweat before. “Francoise, please
tell me what’s wrong.” His voice is calculatedly soothing. She hates this.
He will say what he needs to in order to calm her.
“I can’t do it again! I can’t!”
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And Not to Have is the Beginning of Desire
“Francoise, please. It’ll be fine.” His gray eyes are clear, one slightly
smaller than the other. His face is lopsided, as if he’s had a stroke. But
he hasn’t had a stroke.
She is aware of a fresh lucidity: maybe I can see the future, maybe I know
what will happen now.
“You need to calm yourself,” Otto says. “This isn’t the way to fix anything.”
“It will never be enough! You’ll always think of something else.” She
tries to shout, but her voice is full of holes. She looks at her hand, clenched
and shaking, the skin papery and pale. She whispers, épaule. Shoulder, shoot
him in the shoulder. She begins to cry, feels herself crumpling inside. She
doesn’t want to shoot him. Doesn’t want to hurt him. He is beautiful. He
is the best thing that ever happened to her. He helped her see what she
could be––but he will never let her have it. She will change her life, change
everything. She turns the pistol to her head, as if in mock salute.
I wanted too much. Marina and I spent three weeks together when spring
was on the edge of becoming, but she left me to comfort Otto and Katherine,
who were shaken by the suicide of a graduate student, a poet. I’d seen
the woman around campus; she dressed in vintage clothes or youthful outfits.
She was often by herself, and it was hard to imagine the particular
quality of her absence.
We were lying in my bed when Marina’s cell phone rang, a foreign
chime I didn’t recognize. It was Katherine, calling to say that Otto was
distraught, people were gathering at the house––would she come Marina
was drawn back into the circle of the anointed, and I was left outside,
staring into the light.
Eleanor hasn’t felt sorry for Otto for a long time, but those minutes in
his office must have been awful. The chasm of what is possible has opened
at their feet. Aside from the police, no one dared ask Otto for details. The
university hired someone to clean his office and his books, a lifetime of
reading, were thrown away. Unbearable to have them stained like that.
When she thinks back to her premonition of violence, Eleanor thinks
how little she’d really known. She was like a child absorbed in a fantasy,
waving a piece of sparkling fabric, whispering to herself, while playing
at the edge of a busy freeway.
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She had imagined that, when something finally happened, it would
expose Otto and Katherine, make everything different, but the students
banded together as if Otto and Katherine had been wronged, as if Francoise
had done this to them, rather than to herself.
It’s rumored that Otto is working on a sonnet sequence of elegies.
No one has seen the poems, and Eleanor tries to imagine how the details
will be shaped and burnished, whether Otto will cast himself as Orpheus
in the retelling of the tale.
She surveys the files on her desk. She has to lay the groundwork for
next fall: order textbooks, update the department web page, make desk
assignments for the incoming graduate students. Otto presented her with
the reading list for next semester’s workshop so that she can order books:
Robert Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Rilke’s Sonnets
to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies, Helene Cixious, Wallace Stevens.
She gets out the map of desks and list of names. She chooses a pencil,
one with a good eraser, and feels an odd, hovering sensation, as if her
neck has grown long, her head literally higher. The air hums, buzzing
in her ears, and the list of names seems portentous, like doors with something
hidden behind them. What are the least combustible combinations
She thinks of commanders choosing regiments to go into battle. But this
isn’t the same. She’s not responsible. Still, she’s afraid it will start all over
again. When she sets the pencil’s point on the page, the sharp graphite
touching the paper, it’s as if she’s pulling a trigger with a white cloth over
her eyes.
tahoma literary review 107

On Frans de Waal Declaring “We Are
All Machiavellians” in The Chronicle
of Higher Education
Tim Kahl
He assures us that power is all around us and we
should read dominance into even the lines at Wal-Mart.
The man three positions ahead of me is my better
until I reach the parking lot and notice he drove off
and left his Miller High Life in his cart.
He announces we are exquisitely attuned to power,
that word the grad students from the good suburbs
begin to use in college when they learn they should be
ascribing to its charms. To be top dog, king of the hill,
alpha male, leader of the pack, pick of the litter,
professional go-getter—pick any of these names as you
march up on stage to accept your diploma. Take note of
the ones who defer. They can be bullied later.
He contends that power is perceived with great
accuracy, yet my own shifts from scene to scene.
I am master of the bike trail then come home
to be throttled by my wife’s one penetrating gaze.
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Tim Kahl
Maybe I’m more hostage to mood than submissive
to force. What’s the dif But there’s always that
one delusional guy who thinks he’s got control
of the situation, wears his crown into battle,
offering up “that’s the way it is” to the rest of us who
try to stay the hell out of the way of his Hummer.
If I, reading Machiavelli, looked back on a moment
of crisis and struggle within a group, I, too, might
see only the story of power, the great epic of
clashing strengths, the taut plot lines of strategy
and motive. But would I fail to notice the two guys
in the background with no particular purpose in mind
except to watch the jiggling cellulite of the elite
Tell me, Mr. de Waal, analyst of all primate behavior,
do only fools still believe in altruism I submit
I’m one of those fools. I confess I don’t get status.
I concede I’d make a poor ape—
trying hard to neither lead nor follow.
tahoma literary review 109

Summer at the Horgoš Border
Crossing
Jessica Jewell
I missed her body, and I cried about her body
and I found myself on the carpet knocking
my fists around. I missed her lips, and I cried
about her lips, and I found myself at the mirror
plotting out ways of breaking the law. I missed
her hair, and I cried about the smell of soap
that I could not replicate on my own,
or the sheets or the pillow or the dog. I missed her
eyes, and I cried about her eyes. I missed her plots,
and I found myself acting them out. I discovered
in myself the old key the old radical the old coffee
drinker hollering death threats to the empire
and allies and the Bolsheviks too. I found in myself
the old country and the map she drew for me.
I dreamt only of ghosts and bandits and the Carpathian
plains flooding toward her on wind and wings.
110

Not About Liz
Catherine Moore
There is a fence between one moment and the next: the black of this
bay sparkle on a breakwater, the dappled gray in stacked rock encircling
a field. That field, and that fence, it took careful climbing to breach,
as I remember from age eleven. And it’s odd—smelling farm grass and
watching hooves shuffle, along the seaside.
I’m saving up for a Wild Mustang, Liz always said; they’re unconquered.
My childhood friend ever hopeful, ever bright. Liz the delighted and doted
on, not overlooked like Jana Ray Jones and her bed-tanned mother.
Too busy with her big hair rollers for school start times, at each stoplight
came another minute-long blast of Aqua Net. Her spray swaths the back
seat: first Jana Ray, then Julie Ray, next Jarrett Ray. I stayed second-hand
safe in the front seat, wondering why there wasn’t a new middle name
for each disposable child. Maybe it was the vapors. The busy social life.
Maybe she didn’t care.
Not like Liz’s parents—always home, always watching. Her dad looming
at the sliding glass door. Her mother the kohl eyes behind the upstairs
curtains. A cloistered place without all the holiness clung in air. And
darkest in Liz’s bedroom, no bigger than a stall, where she wanted me
to come, sit, and see her horse dolls. I have to show you my new Appaloosa!
My daddy just brought it home. Those foot-high plastic molded creatures
lined the shelf along her headboard as if on guard. In that room with a
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Not About Liz
riding crop and whip always wound up on the back of her bedroom door,
someday I’m going to ride for real, but that leather looked worn. And the
creepy horses: I didn’t like how she laid back reaching overhead for them,
braying neigh, neigh. Or when she invited me to lie with her to watch in
frightened fascination as she held an invisible rein, lifted her pelvis, moved
in a make-pretend gallop, neigh, neigh. I’d have a hovering sense to bolt.
The way the smell of something wrong lingers and warns you away.
The way I’m back to smelling hooves on sod. Watching rocks skip
along the bay. And the rocks fall way down, down into an old meadow
on top of all the pretty little horses, her favorite Appaloosa, the blacks
and bays, dapple and grays, neigh, neigh.
Those are mine, shouted over the pink cotton panty stretched between
us, crotch twisted thin, at my slumber party. No, no, I have a pair just like
them. I let it go, knowing we weren’t both Sagittarius. I let it all go, the
gray of the braying and french-kissing, and the black in the time she asked,
Does your daddy kiss you goodnight How many times
112

Bow and Cello
Brandon Courtney
I.
Once, lost in the Museum of London,
I sat in the war, plague, & fire
gallery, watching a woman
step slowly back from an oil painting—
The city’s great fire,
Saint Paul’s Cathedral biblical
in its destruction—as if the flames
were real &, in their certainty,
threatened to raze
the grand hall to ash.
A child clung to the hem of her dress,
both of his hands
held to the painting
as if warming them, surprised
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Bow and Cello
to find only the room’s coolness.
Perspective doesn’t give perspective.
We deserve the knowledge
that, separately, horses asleep
beneath spruce in the rain do little
more than pepper the fields
with their darkness, but together make
bow & cello. & the child
who thought to warm his fingers
against a depiction of fire
—we deserve him, too.
IV.
Just a month underway,
the sailors had searched
out shadowed vestibules,
isolated engine rooms
where the whine of turbines
drowned the moans a throat
invents for orgasm.
In a boiler room
humid with steam
I watched, unnoticed,
a man make love to a woman,
young, boyish
I thought, by her hair combed
into a bun.
She suffered him:
Sweat stinking like old coins,
the pressure,
the pain of it all.
114

Brandon Courtney
She mouthed
the word motherfucker
to herself, or to him,
or some idea of him
outside of history.
Or maybe she meant
to curse airplanes, the towers
that collapsed
with a believer’s flare
for kneeling & brought her
here, brought me here.
At nineteen,
what did they know
of the body
At nineteen, they knew
everything the living
know.
tahoma literary review 115

Brothel Song
Jen Lambert
There is no shape to these violent streets,
blue-black nights, wet face dirty windows.
No outline of my body in this bed,
cloth doll, paper star, hide and seek,
this is how we make a cave, we push,
hollow through stone, carve our own hiding spots.
I will give you a new name. You will call
me fish, and we will never be hungry.
We shed our old skins, the birds in our dresses
become new animals, but we are still
afraid. We can hear the hoof beats. We can
hear the drums. No wax, no wick, no candlelight
in this country, no lamp for these alleys.
I am a window, you are the valley.
116

The Aftermath
Nandini Dhar
(after Agha Shahid Ali and Sarah Gorham)
Customary disarray and a doll’s head—calcified on a palisade alone on
the front porch, the slashed face of Jamini Roy's frail blue mother, her
son washed away by the night rain. My sister’s coloring stains on the
wall—what remains of them—after our uncle made her scrub them out
with her tongue.
Lips blackened, blue-bead eyes pulled apart, mold creeping over her
plastic skin, and on the forehead an oversized bindi, stolen from the
aunt’s dressing-table drawer. An ungrateful little girl’s hand has
unbraided each of her neat flaxen braids. No dolls in this house—only
work ethic cliches. And early to bed early to rise. A list of wounds.
Interrogations narrated in intimately plotted details. A story of a young
man’s shriek in every tip of a leaf, drippings of a suspended tire on an
eighteen year old’s back: Naxalbari is not the name of a village only. A
better life for everyone. Scraps of history on the little girls’ brows, their
close-cropped hair, scar on the chin and weeping lips. Memories that
love to poke.
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The Aftermath
Insert fingers inside little girl eyes—wise, open, craving newness.
Insistent ghosts. The result is nothing to behold—a broken doll-head,
two little girls vacillating in their choices—whether tiger or spider or
both.
A failed insurrection and its broken archives—the pasts, presents and
futures of half-loves. Half-convictions. The shame and embarrassment
of half-beliefs. A cow licking its dead calf. Two little girls, eyes stony as
winter dew, open a doll’s head. On a stick, the doll’s head: execution.
The plastic torso: useless, to be donated to the Chief Minister’s Relief
Fund.
118

Honored After Rescue Failed
Nicole Robinson
The lifeguard found the man facedown
behind rocks and six-foot waves
at the Fingal Spit when the bronze fist
of the sun stretched over the Tasman Sea.
Some call the spit a deathtrap, a rattle back,
an almost sand bridge
to the island. Some surfers carve worlds
into waves. “Believe the body”
the man thought and the lifeguard did not
but still dived in.
Then CPR for the reckless:
like wishbones the ribs went snapping.
On the day the lifeguard received his award
waves washed worlds to shore.
A mother gripped a photo of her child
building castles on the beach.
Her thumb had rubbed the ink from his face.
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Honored After Rescued Failed
Tides tumbled in, sand shrank back
and the who we were disappeared like that.
120

But For The Streetlamps and The
Moon and All the Stars
Katie Bickell
Bitch. The word hissed out of Patty’s mouth like the air escaping from
the pop bottle Lacey opened to use as mix. Not that Patty really
thought Mrs. Simperson was a bitch. Really, Mrs. Simperson was smart
and passionate and kind. But she was also a total weirdo who talked about
things like the patriarchy and always had crusty eye boogers and once she
said she wished she were a tree so she could pray all day. That kind of
weird was fair game, really. Besides, she should have known better than
to take on Shannon.
Shannon passed Patty the cigarette she held between her thumb and
index finger. Lacey knelt nearby in the playground sand, pouring blue
Sour Puss and Orange Crush into the thin necks of empty water bottles.
She buried the base of each plastic bottle so it wouldn’t fall over.
“Seriously!” Shannon said, coughing smoke, “I can’t stand the sound
of your laughter I mean, oh my God!”
Lacey snorted. “Yeah, she lost it on you, man. I didn’t think teachers
were allowed to talk like that.”
“They’re not.” Shannon grabbed a bottle from the sand and
climbed onto the balance beam. She flexed and pointed her feet like a
ballerina as she walked. “She’s having, like, a midlife crisis or something.
You know she’s paying some chick to get pregnant with her son’s baby
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But for the Streetlamps and the Moon and All the Stars
She, like, saved his sperm, or something. Gross.”
Lacey’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God.”
Patty bit her lips; Shannon was lying, but she didn’t want to be a knowit-all.
She wasn’t a total spaz. Still, she had to say something.
“That’s messed up. How’d she get her son’s sperm”
Shannon raised her eyebrows at Lacey. They erupted in high-pitched
laughter. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Pervy Pat!”
Patty tried to laugh like she was in on the joke. “No, I mean, like…”
“Oh, no!” Lacey fell to her knees. “My son!” She pretended to cradle
a head on her lap. “Let me just give you a quick hand job before your
balls rot, my boy.” Her fist moved up and down over the invisible crotch.
Patty looked away and took a swig of her drink.
Shannon rolled her eyes. “Ugh, I’m bored. Let’s go somewhere.”
“Mikey’s friends are over. We could drink with them.”
“Yeah,” Shannon said, “But Patty’s not allowed to go to your house,
remember”
“So She’s not allowed to drink or smoke, either.”
“Yeah,” Shannon said, slowly, with enunciation, “but if we go to your
house, your mom will see her, and then she’ll mention it to Patty’s mom
when they see each other at the arena next week.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She stifled a laugh. “I forgot her mom’s the canteen lady
now.” Lacey crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes at Patty. “Don’t you
think it’s kind of mean that you’re not allowed to come to my house Like,
my family isn’t good enough for yours, or something”
Shannon shook her head. “Not very Christian.” she said. “I mean,
what about ’no one shall judge,’ and all that, right”
“Thou shalt not judge,” Patty murmured. She shifted her weight from
one foot to the other, envying the invisible man, dead in the sand. Her
mom got really religious after Patty’s dad left. Before school she’d press
her palm against Patty’s forehead, lifting the other up in prayer. “You are
a daughter of the King,” she liked to say.
But this morning, Patty had ducked away. “I’m dust, Mom; so are
you. We’re all just dust—stardust! There’s no king.” She rolled her eyes.
“No tooth fairy, either,” she murmured.
Her mom swallowed hard as her arms dropped to her sides. She shuffled
and looked away with wet eyes, and Patty realized she was embarrassed.
She felt bad for calling her out, but it was true. Just the day be-
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Katie Bickell
fore, Mr. Nyson had lectured about how almost everything is created from
the burning of interstellar gases, everything: stardust. Besides, the whole
bible freak routine, it was silly, ludicrous. Science, fact, logic, and
proof—that was what it was all about, not that she’d ever say anything
like that to Shannon and Lacey.
Patty kicked sand over the cigarette butt Shannon flicked to the
ground. “I know. It sucks,” she said, “It’s just all that stuff with your brother.
She’s overprotective.”
Whatever, Lacey mouthed, making an L with her index finger and
thumb. The girls left the playground, hands stuffed into the pockets of
their hoodies, capped bottles hiding in their sleeves.
The April night air was crisp but the Sour Puss made Patty feel warm,
alive, euphoric. Stars shone in the cloudless sky and she imagined them
shining brighter just for her, recognizing her as one of their own. Starlight
poured in through her eyes, setting off billions of particles so she radiated
with the same glittery brilliance. Patty stretched out her arms.
“Check out PP,” Lacey giggled.
“Huh”
Behind her Shannon and Lacey walked arm in arm, identical
smirks between curtains of straight blonde hair.
“PP,” Lacey shrieked. “Pervy Pat!”
Shannon laughed until she squirmed, clasping her crotch. “I’m gonna
pee!” She tottered behind a thin tree and dropped her jeans.
A screen door squeaked as they heard a man’s voice shout. “Hey! What
are you doing”
“Oh my God!” Lacey squealed. When they felt they’d run far enough,
the girls collapsed on the grass of a corner lot, laughing hysterically. Lacey
lay on her back and pulled her knees to her chest with her hands, ripping
a loud fart.
“Oh, no!” Shannon said, pulling wet denim from her leg. “I peed on
myself!”
More laughter.
“Here,” Patty took off her sweater and handed it to her, generously,
benevolently. “Tie this around so you don’t get cold.”
The sweater was almost too big for Shannon to tie the arms around
her nonexistent hips. “Are you sure” The way she cooed reminded Patty
of the time Kyle carried Shannon’s desk to the gym for her during midterms.
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But for the Streetlamps and the Moon and All the Stars
“I’m fine,” Patty said. She was better than fine. These were their days,
the days she’d look back on like her mom does whenever a Bryan Adams
song comes on, the best days of my life. She took a sip from her bottle and
realized she was drinking her last mouthful. Patty took aim and threw
the bottle down the street, smiling as it pinged off a yield sign.
“Whoa!” Lacey shouted, swaying. “Good one, PP!” She put her arm
around Patty’s shoulder, leaning on her, drunker than she should have been.
“Did you guys drink without me”
Lacey measured an inch with her index finger and thumb. “We may
have had a few drinky-poos at my house.” She burped.
A few feet ahead, Shannon stood fixed, staring at a rusty Pontiac
parked in front of a yellow-sided house. Something in the air felt electric,
just waiting for a spark.
“Do you know whose car this is” she asked.
“No.”
The black eyeliner that smudged Shannon’s eyes made her seem older,
more sure. Dangerous.
“This is Simperson’s car.”
“How can you tell”
Shannon rolled her eyes. “Come on, Patty. Look!”
Patty peered into the car. A textbook sat on the back seat, the same
one the girls were supposed to be reading in class. A list of vocabulary
words poked out from between its pages.
“You see, that There” Shannon pointed at a small black pouch dangling
from the review mirror. “You know what that is”
“Air freshener”
“That’s her kid’s fucking ashes,” she whispered. “She says he keeps
her safe. Like he’s her guardian angel, or something.” She pulled at the
passenger’s door handle. “Holy shit. It’s open!”
The girls looked around, the street empty and dark but for the streetlamps
and the moon and all the stars.
Lacey and Shannon emptied the car systematically while Patty paced
the sidewalk, chewing her thumbnail. They put Mrs. Simperson’s books
on her lawn in a neat pile. They laid a wool cardigan beside them, a pair
of Sorel boots on top of that, and balanced three empty coffee cups on
top of her insurance and registration papers. It was done quietly, carefully,
ceremoniously.
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Katie Bickell
Finished, Shannon walked to Patty and pressed something soft into
her palm. The pouch.
“Come on, Patty, you’re the creative one.”
Lacey snorted. “Yeah right! PP’s Simperson’s pet. They’re best buds
with their lesbo poems and their nerd books.” She stumbled and fell onto
the pile beside her, her wrist catching the corner of the top hardcover.
“Shit!” She pressed the scratch with her thumb.
Patty blushed. It was super lame, staying after school to write, but
Mrs. Simperson said she had talent, a voice. Getting special attention like
that, though, it was weird. Good weird, but she didn’t know how to act
or what to say. It made her think of her mom, of the before-school prayers.
“Well”
Patty shrugged. She slid the pouch out of Shannon’s hand the same
way she saw potheads pass baggies in the cafeteria: quick, cool, nonchalant.
She walked to a plastic birdbath in the middle of the Simpersons’
lawn. Slowly, Patty untied the pouch’s drawstring, smoothing the
ruched material. Pinching the bag by its corners, she flipped it over, dumping
its contents into the dry birdbath.
She expected a cloud of white soot to pillow into her face, but the
ashes fell in a clump, like dirt, only kicking up a little dust. She didn’t feel
awful or evil, either, like she thought she would. She felt big, brave, victorious.
The girls clapped for her from the sidewalk. It’d probably end up
being good for Mrs. Simperson, really. Maybe now she could move on,
let go. Driving around with your kid’s dead body, that couldn’t be easy.
It must have been years since he died.
Patty turned with her fist in the air like the braless protestors in the
photos that hung in Simperson’s classroom. While she kept lookout, Shannon
kicked Simperson’s books across the lawn, picking up the heavier ones,
ripping out their pages. Lacey pulled down her leggings and tried to squat
over the birdbath, but fell. She sat in the bowl, her bum right on the ashes,
and peed.
“Run!”
A light shone through the Simpersons’ front window. Patty stuffed
the empty pouch into the waistband of her jeans; there was no squealing,
this time. No time to escape, either.
The girls huddled behind three garbage cans across the street, flinching
when they heard a man shout. Patty heard the slam of a door, foltahoma
literary review 125

But for the Streetlamps and the Moon and All the Stars
lowed by footsteps and Mrs. Simperson’s far away voice, breaking with
sleep.
You’d better come out here, Love.
Darling, what’s wrong
And then, she heard her moan.
She heard the clap-clap-clap of slippered-feet run to the car so close
to where they hid. She heard Mrs. Simperson cry out again and again and
again. Jamie, Jamie, her voice keened, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.
There was a quiet ache, a pause. Mrs. Simperson’s cries were muffled.
He’s holding her, Patty realized. It was strange to think of Mrs. Simperson
in a man’s arms, of her being loved like that. The girls squatted
until their knees shook, pressing their mouths to their shoulders to keep
from making noise when their thighs began to burn. Then, at the sound
of a closing door, they ran.
They stuck to the suburban tree lines, creeping between houses when
possible, staying off main roads. Shannon walked ahead as though she
was trying to lose the others. By the time they reached the trails that led
to Shannon’s house, Patty had one arm propped under Lacey’s shoulder,
helping her walk.
“Can I still sleep over, Shannon” Lacey asked, slurring her words.
“Are you for real” Shannon snapped, turning around. She kept her
pace but walked backwards. “As if! You’re disgusting, Lacey, just gross.
You fucking pissed on someone’s ashes. Like, you actually peed on a dead
body. Holy fuck!”
Lacey started to cry. “I can’t go home.” Her voice was the same low
moan that had escaped Simperson’s throat. “I’m going to get in so much
trouble.” Spit drooled down Lacey’s chin.
“Whatever.” Shannon said. “I can’t even believe you.” She turned
around and quickened her pace, disappearing around the bend of the trail.
Lacey started to heave. She let go of Patty’s shoulder and dropped
to the ground. She turned to her right and threw up, catching vomit in
her hair. Patty sat beside her and rubbed her shoulders.
“I’m sorry I’m so mean to you, Patty.” She whimpered, wiping her
mouth with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “It’s just, I’m so tired of everything.”
She started to sob.
“I mean, my mom can’t even take my sister to hockey anymore. It’s
like, everyone thinks Mikey’s suddenly some monster now, some awful
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Katie Bickell
person.” She hiccupped and lay down, curling into herself, pressing her
forehead into Patty’s leg. Patty smoothed Lacey’s wet hair away from her
face.
“He didn’t even want to do it. He’s always, like, respected girls. They
made him. All the new guys had to. It was, like, stupid college stuff. He
had to.”
Patty lay down beside her and stared at the sky. The stars were dim,
cold; just balls of gas burning a hundred trillion miles away. She felt something
pinch at her hip and pulled the pouch from her waist, feeling its
grains and powder under her fingertips. Just a pocket of stardust, she
thought. No. Jamie. Jamie.
tahoma literary review 127

Salvatore
Paul J. Willis
It was the mile we ran together.
I had some grace in the way I did it,
or so I imagined, but you
were the angular plodder, always staring
down the lane to where you would be,
following me across the line.
Afterward, nobody spoke to you on the bus—
your thick black hair, your stony face,
your dark shoes big as a circus.
On a back road, we watched you disappear
into an unpainted house with walls
made of rain and blackberry vines.
Senior year, you moved
into an old hotel down by the river.
With some girl. The carpet in the hallway
there was stained with sourness and smoke.
On Christmas Day, I left a red
Swiss Army knife beside your door.
128

Paul J. Willis
Sal, did I know you I remember
your hard breathing, just behind
my right shoulder, the inexorable
slap of your feet in those flat
and broken tennis shoes as they cut
at my heels around each bend.
tahoma literary review 129

Signs
Diane Lockward
To find yourself in the park on the very day
all the dogs stayed home, surely, that’s a sign.
To trust once more in the greenness of grass,
that the blades will not cut you. To believe
that the stony path leads somewhere, not nowhere,
and is not a metaphor for your heart, that a soft
rabbit still lives inside you and after its long sleep
rubs its pink eyes, rises, and brings you back
to the park. To stand beside the playground
to gaze at the giant concrete turtle, without hating
the young mothers whose children climb across
its capacious back. To release the string that’s held
you tight as a noose and watch the balloon of sorrow
float into the blue sky and disperse like helium.
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Diane Lockward
To know that the brook babbles again for you,
that purple hyacinths bloom unbruised this year—
violets, lilacs, wisteria, too—that the turtle is now
your emblem, and if you’re lucky, which you are,
those you have shut out, those you have hurt
with the hard shell of your silence will somehow
still love you and you will move towards them,
carrying the ancient notched shell, your back
uncrushed by its weight, the mystery
of its hieroglyphics unfolded and laid at their feet.
tahoma literary review 131

Self-Portrait in Dystopian
Landscape
Stephen Lackaye
It doesn’t make less sense than the world we had before.
Mostly, windows have gone to the afterlife of windows,
the houses all are tumbledown, and no one’s neighbors close,
which does little to distinguish it from other places we’ve lived,
towns where we set short odds starting fights on cheap bets
outside pool halls. What sense has it ever made to empty
a beer into a man’s lap so that he can get up and try to hit you
Or to bother his girl enough that he has no choice
The pool halls here still thrive on that same admixture of
boredom and risk, though the crowds keep thinning
towards settlements alive with more promising rumors.
Houses en route get scavenged like romance in its long
diminishment: front doors hauled off hinge-and-all,
blank foyers left, the yawning mouths of teenagers
sick of kissing. At least we’ve had our practice
in the methods of survival: accept you’ll never leave,
or go insane; speak always in the plural;
find an alternative brand of patience in the violent
conversations of chalk and cue and felt-fielded slate.
I run the tables alone, while reason remains
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Stephen Lackaye
beside the point, and memory quiets like streetlamps
feeding neighborhoods back to darkness. Still, some nights
I’ll stop at a house I know, and knock the jilted frame
to feel how once illumination could come suddenly
to an upper floor. Cold wires wait without hum
over trees snowed in concrete dust. We live at this edge
of the knuckle and the outcome that’s never in doubt.
It makes no less sense than any hope. I’ll knock again tomorrow.
tahoma literary review 133

134

tahoma literary review 135

Contributor Bios
Shaindel Beers (“‘And they, since they / Were not the
one dead, turned to their affairs’”) is the author of two
full-length collections of poetry, A Brief History of Time
(2009) and The Children’s War and Other Poems (2013),
both from Salt Publishing. She teaches at Blue Mountain
Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, and
serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary.
Katie Bickell (“But for the Streetlamps and the Moon
and All the Stars”) lives in Alberta, Canada, with her husband
and young daughters. Her work has appeared in
Eunoia Review, Gravel, Bare Fiction, Punchnel’s, Herizons,
A cappella Zoo and One Throne Magazine. “But For the
Streetlamps...” is one of a collection of serialized short
stories currently seeking representation. Read more of her work at
katiebickell.com.
Emma Bolden (“Catechism”) is the author of Maleficae
(GenPop Books, 2013) and medi(t)ations, forthcoming
from Noctuary Press. She’s also the author of four chapbooks
of poetry: How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge
by Edge, Toadlily Press); The Mariner’s Wife, (Finishing
Line Press); The Sad Epistles (dancing girl press); This Is
Our Hollywood (in The Chapbook)—and one nonfiction chapbook—
Georgraphy V, forthcoming from Winged City Press. Her work has appeared
in such journals as The Rumpus, Harpur Palate, Prairie Schooner,
136

Contributors
Conduit, the Indiana Review, the Greensboro Review, Redivider, Verse, Feminist
Studies, The Journal, Guernica, and Copper Nickel.
Leland Cheuk (“A Letter From Your Dinosaur”) has been
awarded fellowships and artist residencies at the Mac-
Dowell Colony, I-Park Foundation, and Brush Creek
Foundation for the Arts. His writing has appeared in publications
such as The Rumpus, Lunch Ticket, and Pif Magazine.
He has been a finalist for the James Jones First
Novel Fellowship, the Salamander Fiction Prize (judged by Edith Pearlman),
and the national Washington Square Review fiction contest (judged
by Darin Strauss). He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University.
He lives in Brooklyn.
Brandon Courtney (“Bow and Cello”) was born and
raised in Iowa, served four years in the United States
Navy (Operation Enduring Freedom), and is a graduate
of the MFA program at Hollins University. His poetry
is forthcoming or appears in Best New Poets, The Journal,
32 Poems, Guernica, and Boston Review. His book, The
Grief Muscles, is forthcoming from Sheep Meadow Press. Thrush Press
published his chapbook, Improvised Devices. He is a graduate student at
the University of Chicago.
Nandini Dhar (“The Aftermath”) hails from Kolkata, India.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Potomac
Review, PANK, Natural Bridge, Whiskey Island and
Southern Humanities Review. Her work has also been featured
in the anthology The Moment of Change: An Anthology
of Feminist Speculative Writing. She teaches postcolonial
literature at Florida International University, and co-edits the
online journal Elsewhere.
Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow’s (“In Which Case I Could Stay/Open”)
debut poetry collection is The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of
Metaphor (Salmon Poetry, 2012). She is the 2012 Red Hen Press Poetry
Award Winner, for her poem “Super Dan Comics Question Box Setahoma
literary review 137

Contributors
out in 2016.
ries # 18.” A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared
widely in numerous journals, including The American
Poetry Review, ACM, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast,
American Literary Review, Barrow Street, Folio, Smartish
Pace, The Tusculum Review, and Galatea Resurrects. She is
working on her second full-length verse collection, due
Kevin Honold (“Dialectics”) was born in Cincinnati,
Ohio. He received an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University
and is currently a PhD candidate at the University
of Cincinnati. His first book of poems, Men as Trees
Walking, was the winner of the 2009 Ohio State University/The
Journal prize and was published in 2010 by
Ohio State University Press.
Amorak Huey (“Ars Poetica Disguised as a Love Poem
Disguised as a Commemoration of the 166th Anniversary
of the Rescue of the Donner Party”), a former newspaper
editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley
State University in Michigan. His chapbook The Insomniac
Circus is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press,
and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Collagist, Menacing
Hedge, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Follow him
on Twitter: @amorak.
Jessica Jewell (“Summer at the Horgoš Border Crossing”)
is the program manager for the Wick Poetry Center
at Kent State University. Her poetry has appeared
in Cider Press Review, American Poetry Journal, Nimrod,
Harpur Palate, Copper Nickel, Fjords Review, Rhino, Barn
Owl Review and Poetry Midwest, among others. Her chapbook,
Slap Leather, was published by dancing girl press.
Tim Kahl (“On Frans de Waal Declaring ‘We Are All Machiavellians’
in The Chronicle of Higher Education”) (timkahl.com) is the author of Possessing
Yourself (CW Books 2009) and The Century of Travel (CW Books,
138

Contributors
2012). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner,
Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, The Journal,
Parthenon West Review, and many other journals in
the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry
and poetics blog The Great American Pinup
(greatamericanpinup.wordpress.com/) and the poetry
video blog Linebreak Studios (linebreakstudios.blogspot.com). He is
also editor of Bald Trickster Press and Clade Song (cladesong.com). He
is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry
Center.
Robert King’s (“First Husband”) first book, Old Man
Laughing (Ghost Road Press), was a finalist for the 2008
Colorado Book Award in Poetry and his second, Some
of These Days has appeared in 2013 from Conundrum
Press. He lives in Greeley, Colorado, where he directs
the website ColoradoPoetsCenter.org.
Stephen Lackaye’s (“Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape”)
poems have appeared recently in American Literary
Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Conte, Grist: The Journal
for Writers, Los Angeles Review, and RHINO. He lives
in Beaverton, Oregon, where he works for Powell’s Books
and teaches online for Northeastern University.
Jen Lambert (“Brothel Song”) is a founding editor of burntdistrict
and Spark Wheel Press, and her work has been published
in a variety of journals and anthologies including
PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and Boxcar Poetry Review.
Jen is currently living in Newfoundland with her husband
and three wildly beautiful children. jenlambert.net.
Diane Lockward (“Signs”) is the author of The Crafty Poet:
A Portable Workshop (Wind Publications, 2013) and three
poetry books, most recently Temptation by Water. Her previous
books are What Feeds Us, which received the 2006
Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, and Eve’s Red Dress.
tahoma literary review 139

Contributors
Her poems have been included in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon
River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured
on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.
Rachel Mennies (“Caldera”) is the author of The Glad
Hand of God Points Backwards (Texas Tech University
Press, 2014), winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book
Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, The
Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere, and has
been reprinted at Poetry Daily.
Amanda Moore (“The Broken Leg”) is a teacher and poet
living with her family in San Francisco, where her heart
is (when it’s not in Detroit, Chicago, or one of the other
cities she has called home). Her work has appeared
in journals and anthologies, and she is at work on a full
collection of poems.
Catherine Moore (“Not About Liz”) is a freelance writer
and poet. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from
the University of Tampa, after a prior career in public
relations. Some of Catherine’s publications include
short stories and poems in Six Little Things, MaMaZina
magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Provo Canyon Review.
Her poems have earned First Place prizes with both the Mississippi
and Alabama State Poetry Societies, and a merit-fellowship with the Summer
Literary Series Workshop. She is the 2014 Winner of the Southeast
Review’s Gearhart Poetry Contest. Catherine lives in the Nashville area
where she enjoys a thriving arts community.
Charlotte Morganti (“What Would Your Mother Say”)
has been a burger flipper, beer slinger, lawyer, and aficionada
of the perfect tourtière. And, always, a stringertogether-of-words.
In addition to her law degree, Charlotte
holds a master of fine arts degree. She lives on the
west coast of British Columbia with her husband and the
quirky characters that populate her fiction.
140

Contributors
Valerie Nieman (“Notorious”) is the author of three novels,
the most recent being Blood Clay, and a collection of
short stories, Fidelities. Her fiction has been honored with
the Eric Hoffer Prize in General Fiction and two Elizabeth
Simpson Smith awards. She is also the author of
two chapbooks and one poetry collection, Wake Wake
Wake, and her poetry has won the Greg Grummer Prize, the Byron Herbert
Reece Prize, and the Nazim Hikmet Prize. Currently a North Carolina
Arts Council poetry fellow, she has received an NEA creative writing
fellowship as well as writing support in West Virginia and Kentucky.
She is the poetry editor of Prime Number magazine.
Elizabeth Oness’s (“And Not to Have is the Beginning
of Desire”) poems and stories have appeared in The Hudson
Review, Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg
Review and other magazines. Her stories have received
an O. Henry Prize, a Nelson Algren Award, and
the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. Her books include Articles
of Faith (University of Iowa Press), Departures (Penguin), Twelve Rivers
of the Body (Gival Press), and Fallibility (New Rivers Press). She directs
marketing and development for Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press,
and lives on a biodynamic farm in Minnesota.
Austin R. Pick (“A Survey of Disfigurements”) was born
in North Carolina and has traveled widely while pursuing
an interest in contemplative practice and a love of the
world’s wild places. Austin’s writing has appeared in
Pleiades, Metazen, Adbusters Magazine and elsewhere. He
lives in Colorado, and his website is www.Fudo-
Mouth.net.
Leslie Pietrzyk (“Gratitude Journal”) is the author of two
novels, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Her
short fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, River
Styx, Shenandoah, The Sun, and other journals. She is
a member of the core faculty at the Converse College
Low-Residency MFA program.
tahoma literary review 141

Contributors
Susan Rich (“Sunday Afternoon Retrospect”) is the author
of four collections of poetry, most recently, Cloud
Pharmacy and The Alchemist’s Kitchen, which was a Finalist
for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State
Book Award. Her poems appear in the Antioch Review,
New England Review and Witness. Find her online at The
Alchemists Kitchen http://thealchemistskitchen.blogspot.com.
Nicole Robinson (“Honored After Rescue Failed”) is the
outreach manager for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent
State University. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming,
in CALYX Journal, Literary Imagination, The
Louisville Review, Minerva Rising, Spillway, and elsewhere.
Ciara Shuttleworth (“Conductive Hearing”)’s work has
been published in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review,
Confrontation, The New Yorker, and The Southern Review.
Her website is www.ciarashuttleworth.com. Any given
Sunday, she can be found doing a long run in Central
Park.
Tara Skurtu (“Shame”) teaches Creative Writing at
Boston University, where she received a Robert Pinsky
Global Fellowship and an Academy of American Poets
Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Review,
Memorious, DMQ Review, The Dalhousie Review, the minnesota
review, B O D Y, and The Los Angeles Review.
Stefen Styrsky’s (“Men in White”) fiction and poetry has
appeared in The James White Review, Cactus Heart, Between,
Seltzer Zine and Fresh Men 2: New Voices in Gay Fiction.
He has written for Gay City News and the Lambda
Book Report. He lives in Washington, DC.
142

Contributors
July Westhale (“The Last Five Years”) is a Pushcartnominated
poet, activist, and radical archivist with a weakness
for botany and hot air balloons. She has been awarded
residencies from the Lambda Literary Foundation,
Tin House and Bread Loaf. Her poetry has most recently
been published in burntdistrict, The Journal of Kentucky
Studies, WordRiot, 580 Split, Quarterly West, and PRISM International. Her
poetry can also be found in the recently released anthologies: Women Write
Resistance, and Contemporary Queer Poetry. She was recently nominated
as a Best New Poet for 2012 and 2013, for an AWP Intro Award, and as
a finalist for a Creative Writing Fulbright. www.julywesthale.com
Miles White (“Don’t Start Me Talking”) is the author
of the flash fiction collections Jesus Loves You But Not Today
and Download the Moon from his series the Canvas Sextet.
He is a former staff writer for USA TODAY and the
author of From Jim Crow to Jay Z: Race, Rap and the Performance
of Masculinity, a highly acclaimed socio-historical
study of hip hop music and culture. He holds a PhD in ethnomusicology
from the University of Washington and a B.A. in English from the
Colorado College. He lives in Central Europe with his partner Karin and
their dog Rex.
Paul J. Willis (“Salvatore”) is a professor of English at
Westmont College and a former poet laureate of Santa
Barbara. His most recent collections of poetry are Say
This Prayer into the Past (Cascade Books, 2013) and Rosing
from the Dead (Wordfarm, 2009). Learn more at
www.pauljwillis.com.
Terry Wolverton (“Phrenologist’s Leap”) has authored
ten books of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. She’s
just re-released her novel, Bailey’s Beads, in paperback and
e-book. She’s the founder of Writers At Work, a Los Angeles
creative writing studio, and is a member of the Affiliate
Faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Antioch
University Los Angeles. www.terrywolverton.com.
tahoma literary review 143

Contributors
Yim Tan Wong (“Sirius Lament in Canis Minor”) is a
Kundiman Emerging Asian American Poets Fellow and
holds an MFA from Hollins University. Her first poetry
collection has been a finalist for Four Way Books’
Levis Prize as well as the Alice James Books/Kundiman
Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in, or
are forthcoming from The Cortland Review, Little Patuxent Review, Vermillion
Literary Project, A capella Zoo, Phoebe, RATTLE, Sakura Review, Redactions,
Tidal Basin Review, Mascara Literary Review (Australia), and Crab Orchard
Review, among other journals.
Carolyne Wright’s (“Fire Season”) most recent poetry
collection is Mania Klepto: the Book of Eulene (Turning
Point Books, 2011). A poem appeared in The Best American
Poetry 2009 and the Pushcart Prize XXXIV (2010).
She lives in Seattle and serves on the faculty of the Northwest
Institute of Literary Arts MFA Program.
144

About TLR
Tahoma Literary Review is a quarterly journal published in both print
and e-reader formats. We are based in the Pacific Northwest, but
we are international in scope.
We at Tahoma Literary Review are committed to producing a literary
journal from the professional writer’s perspective; we believe that writers
deserve compensation for the weeks or months it takes to compose
a publishable poem or story. A major goal of Tahoma Literary Review is
to show that writers and publishers can support each other not only artistically,
but also financially.
We believe in a collaborative publication model. Literary journals
that pay their contributors are rare; most journals offer only exposure,
a somewhat questionable concept in a landscape that is crowded with writers,
but sadly limited by lack of recognition in mainstream culture. A substantial
number of journals now hold contests, with entry fees typically
in the $15 to $30 range—usually with one winner, and maybe a few finalist
prizes—instead of paying all contributors.
Our model attempts to find a middle ground that is more equitable.
TLR will offer both professional payment and exposure to our contahoma
literary review 145

About TLR
tributors by using a substantial portion of our total income to support
our authors. Payment for fiction ranges from a minimum of $50 to $300.
Payment for poetry and cover art is $25 to $50. The amount is determined
by the revenues received from submission fees, print journal sales
and contributions from sources such as donors and foundations. To ensure
transparency and fairness, we will publish an audited quarterly revenue
statement to verify the funds received for the submission period.
Even if a submission is not accepted for publication, submitters get
value for their fees. Their payment gives them access to our Endnotes
area, which features artist interviews, writing advice from experts, and
more. Supporters (donors and print subscribers) also have access to this
area.
If you'd like to support our work, please donate via our web site. Every
dollar donated to TLR goes to pay our authors. Even small amounts are
appreciated.
146

TLR Staff
Kelly Davio is the author of the poetry collection
Burn This House (Red Hen Press, 2013) and the novel-in-poems
Jacob Wrestling (Pink Fish Press, 2015).
Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Verse Daily,
The Rumpus, and others. She is also a regular reviewer
for Women’s Review of Books. She earned her
MFA in poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary
Arts, and teaches English as a Second Language
in the Seattle area.
Joe Ponepinto was formerly the Book Review
Editor for The Los Angeles Review. His short stories,
articles and reviews have been published in dozens
of literary journals. His collection of short stories,
The Face Maker, is available on Amazon.com. Joe is
a graduate of the MFA program at the Northwest
Institute of Literary Arts in Washington State. He
was a journalist, political speechwriter and business
owner before turning to creative writing full time
in 2006. A New York native, he spent 28 years in LA. He is a new arrival
to the Northwest, having moved from Michigan to Washington in mid-
2014. His blog on the writing life is at joeponepinto.com.
tahoma literary review 147

TLR Staff
Yi Shun Lai (say "yeeshun" for her first name), Nonfiction
Editor, has been a writer and editor for oh,
practically ever. Her work appeared most recently
at CutbankOnline.org, The-Toast.net, TheHairpin.com,
and in Apeiron Review. In a previous life, she
worked in the environmental and outdoors journalism
field and wrote for the legendary J. Peterman
catalog. She has a degree in fiction from the
Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, and believes
that a good story trumps genre any day. She writes corporate copy for
everyone from lingerie retailers to sustainable-furniture designers in her
spare time. Find her on Twitter @gooddirt.
148

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152

TAHOMA LITERARY REVIEW
volume 1, number 1 Summer 2014
Poetry
Shaindel Beers
Brandon Courtney
Nandini Dhar
Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow
Kevin Honold
Amorak Huey
Jessica Jewell
Tim Kahl
Robert King
Stephen Lackaye
Jen Lambert
Diane Lockward
Rachel Mennies
Amanda Moore
Valerie Nieman
Susan Rich
Nicole Robinson
Ciara Shuttleworth
Tara Skurtu
July Westhale
Paul J. Willis
Terry Wolverton
Yim Tan Wong
Carolyne Wright
Fiction
Katie Bickell
Emma Bolden
Leland Cheuk
Catherine Moore
Charlotte Morganti
Elizabeth Oness
Austin R. Pick
Leslie Pietrzyk
Stefen Styrsky
Miles White
Photography
Wesley B.
TLR
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