SAND 25

Lost + Found
SAND e.V. Editor in Chief
c/o Bellini Ashley Moore
Dunckerstr. 37
10439 Berlin
Managing Editor
Website Ruby Mason
www.sandjournal.com

Email Editorial Coordinator

info@sandjournal.com Sara Anwar

Facebook
facebook.com/sandjournal Art Editor
Alia Zapparova
Twitter
@sandjournal
Poetry Editors
Instagram Emma C Lawson
@sandjournalberlin Crista Siglin

© SAND, March 2023

All authors, translators, and artists retain their copyrights Senior Creative Nonfiction Editor
to the respective works. SAND e.V. is a registered association Melissa Richer
(Verein) under German law.

Cover Junior Creative Nonfiction Editors

“Untitled” Patrice Liang
by Katayoon Valamanesh Anne-Sophie Balzer

Designed by
Déborah-Loïs Séry Fiction Editors
Ashley Moore
Fonts Siena Powers
Redaction by Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts Ambika Thompson
Inter by Rasmus Andersson Dženana Vucic

Paper
R Munken Print White 15, 90 gsm (inside) Distribution and Funding Coordinators
MetsaBoard Prime FBB Bright, 235 g/m2 (cover) Natalia Dumont
Clea Wurster
Printed in Latvia by Lizzy Yarwood
Jelgavas Tipogrāfija Maria Alvarez
 5

Communications Coordinator Ashley Moore

Jeannette Pang

Funding Coordinator
Macy Ripley
Editor’s note
Whether we want to admit it, there is a profound relief in structure
Designer and happy endings. Tomaž Šalamun reminds us of this some-
Déborah-Loïs Séry times-irresistible pull in “Sonnet of Motion,” translated by Brian
Henry: “Stories that have a first scene, a second / scene, a first
border, a second border, surrender like / a lump of meat. The brain
Verein Coordinator slips and smacks its lips.” There’s reassurance in knowing begin-
Christina Wegener nings have endings and even uncertain outcomes can contain a
sense of the sublime.

Fiction Readers Other times, creative work provides a respite by allowing us to

Helena Glover Weiss collectively float untethered through experiences we don’t
Michael Nyakundi yet comprehend—those moments in which we dig
Khionna Douglas to uncover, collect, and piece together, when
Anna Linetsky even fragments provide a sense of ground-
Susan Graunke ing, however provisional. Accepting frag-
Seema Iyer mentation can provide an unexpectedly
Elizabeth Schippers solid foundation, as in Sonia Boué’s
Holly Rowley collage series “Crip Time,” which
Zoe Deleuil uses “sensory fragmentation” to
Kelly Dignan provide “an invocation for the
Pooja Ghosh healing to begin.”
Catia Dawood
Angela Hanyak This type of search for the lost
and found is at the heart of
SAND 25—losing and finding
personal histories and identi-
ties, reflecting on what is lost
and found with the passing of
time, being called upon by the
past to find what’s been lost,
and finding wonder in the in-
finite expanse of the universe,
which can mirror our own most
intimate experiences in uncanny
ways.

SAND 25 contains a strong spirit of

exploration, a willingness to discover
6 7

by jumping off into the unknown. In Kyra Simone’s short story Cherednychenko, meanwhile, reflects in real-time on the anxious
“Invisibilia,” celestial and human time intermingle as an otherwise anticipation of war in “The First Week,” a series begun “in
successful artist and musician seeks true meaning and achieve- the first week of the war, when the only thing left to
ment in his search for earthly fragments of ancient stars. Individua- expect was tomorrow.”
lity, difference, and queerness are celebrated in Elaine Chao’s
series “Beast of Burden,” which invites us to embrace “the 'alien' All of this searching and uncertainty,
side of ourselves.” The hope and anxiety of risking the unknown is this lost and found, brings me back
palpable in Ciara Maguire’s poem “OK !!!”: “i have spent all summer to SAND 25’s untitled cover art
pressed / between the sun and a hard place! anything that happens / by Katayoon Valamanesh. At
in nature must be okay! even if it is terrifying!” first glance, the golden disc
demands attention and al-
Other work in the issue takes an almost forensic approach to most begs to be touched.
understanding, honing in on intimate details in an attempt Only later do we notice
to find grounding. Esther Heller’s “Points of Memory” the obscured figure,
threads together the available pieces of Esther’s and perhaps we are
mother’s life as a radical act of preservation frustrated, or curious,
and resistance to racism. Overlapping imag- or intrigued by what
es of personal artifacts and news reports is concealed. Is the
combine with poetry and prose “to vo- figure hiding, or
calise a memory to understanding.” In protecting them-
Rachel Herz’s “Nomenclature,” prota- selves? Are they
gonist Dina questions her often mis- lost, hoping to be
understood name, attempting to lose found, or waiting
her identity before finding it again. And to reveal them-
even when the search produces evi- selves? Is this a
dence, clarity can still be complicated, playful game of
as Barbara Genova’s poem “he does hide-and-seek? Is
self help for men” conveys: “did he do it: the figure guarding
eh, probably not / does it matter: reason- the portal to an
able doubt.” undiscovered world?
What is calling out to
Both doubt and comfort derive from our us? What would we
memories, which can obscure as much as they find if we answered the
reveal. Memory serves as both a grounding force call?
and source of self-doubt about home for the speaker in
Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi’s poem “Nō 80, Lewis Street”: “I am / begin- Ashley Moore
ning to understand the miracle of memories. / What it means to
sit in nostalgia, & find your stool / wizening into saw dust.” Artist With Ruby Mason, Sara Anwar, Alia
Arushee Suri also grapples with disintegration in the series “Land- Zapparova, Crista Siglin, Emma C
scapes of Dreams and Distant Memories,” as fading recollections Lawson, Melissa Richer, Patrice Liang,
are preserved in art by calling on sensory memory. Phương Anh Anne-Sophie Balzer, Siena Powers, Ambika
approaches the remembrance of war through the lens of ekphrasis Thompson, and Dženana Vucic
in their hybrid flash fiction piece, “Flowerie War,” using the art of
Trần Trọng Vũ as inspiration to “retrace…memory’s dusty skin”
so that “chrysanthemums will grow.” Ukrainian artist Veronika
8 9

hokku/haiku/one-image poems: | P.12 Why I Don’t Like Coming to NAIA

Sana Hajra Siddiqi Two Hours Early | P.56
Julia Ongking
Invisibilia | P.13
Kyra Simone Extract from Grieving over ashes
(or Exercises on how to disappear) | P.57
Landscapes of Dreams and Distant Memories | P.25 Guide Aguilera Castro
Arushee Suri
The First Week | P.58
enantiomeric response | P.29 Veronika Cherednychenko
Dr. Patricia Falkenburg
Nō 80, Lewis Street | P.62
Points of Memory | P.30 Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi
Esther Heller
ALKA | P.63
untitled | P.39 Katarina Gotic tr. Katarina Gotic
Ditta Baron Hoeber
If in the Way of Time | P.66
If I go missing | P.40 Ajay Kumar
Sarpong Osei Asamoah
he does self help for men | P.77
Natureza-morta com guarda-chuva ferido / Barbara Genova
Still life with wounded umbrella | P.41
João Luís Barreto Guimarães sticky fingers | P.78
tr. Calvin Olsen Allis Sääsk

Days Too Long | P.44 Crip Time | P.79

Dominika Šimková Sonia Boué

Eye, ‫ | آی‬P.48 blister partition | P.82

Roya Zendebudie Rina Kenovic

Sonet Giba / Sonnet of Motion | P.51 Ya Got Lost in a Jet Stream | P.84
Tomaž Šalamun tr. Brian Henry Devon Mello

The Town: Monument | P.52 People sitting in strawberries

Lauren Schenkman and working | P.90
Mirjam Zeise

Table of contents Table of contents

10 11

four | P.92 Alive | P.125

Abbie Hart James Croal Jackson

murdered by meme: sonnet | P.93 Flowerie War | P.127

Lemmy Ya’akova Phương Anh

the breast water balloons-gravity, gravity | P.94 Withdraw | P.130

Constance Bacchus Cau Silva

Nomenclature | P.95 Prelude to survival or how I learned

Rachel Herz the language of phobia | P.133
Abdulkareem Abdulkareem
Pass Photo | P.100
Katayoon Valamanesh Notes | P.136

At Twenty Minutes to Nine & The Seagull | P.104 Contributors | P.138

Nora Nadjarian

CROQUET WITH GOD | P.106

Elizabeth Hill

OK !!! | P.108
Ciara Maguire

There Is a Rose | P.109

Cassidy Menard

DIG A CAVE INTO THE FUTURE | P.120

Patrycja Humienik

Beast of Burden | P.121

Elaine Chao

APRÈS-SOLEIL | P.124
Gamze S. Saymaz

Table of contents Table of contents

12 Poetry 13 Fiction

Sana Hajra Siddiqi Kyra Simone

hokku/haiku/one-image poems:
Invisibilia
instinctual smile since
eye contact is collision— On the black and white screen they would appear as dull shapes
how’ve you been today? of rock, mere blobs moving imperceptibly through a field of graphs
and numbers. No one would suspect them to be remnants of an
daddy long legs crouched ancient galaxy, distant specks drifting in mute orbit around the sun
creep of a corner through the infinite array. Perhaps one is followed by the shadow
another web colonised of a small companion moon, the other cratered with pools of lava,
where volcanic waves lap onto the shore of an airless world, its core
walking under or between, a pulsing ventricle of melted iron. But there are no screens and no
a colonnade of trees, one to look at them. Screens haven’t been invented yet. The idea
god! the light that seeps through of time does not even exist, though time itself does. These two as-
teroids will soar through the nothingness unnoticed, too small to
leaves that struggle in the wind be planets, floating as afterthoughts into deep space. Until some
rustling and shaking celestial dish of milk is upturned.
our nervousness calls

each window in the building
a picture frame reference It is a moonless night in the town. There have been many moon-
but just not of you less nights in many moonless towns. Billions of years have passed.
Countless asteroids—known and unknown—have traversed the
sultry summer sting sky. Now, four men with guitars stand on a stage in the tavern,
a queer stifling thing strumming in unison before a crowd. The musicians are wear-
everything has something to do with me ing jeans and blazers with the sleeves pushed up, their haircuts
a brazen assortment of mullets. The year is 1982. Soon, it will be
stand: open closet 1983, and then 1984, and eventually, another decade. But it will
close: open casket feel like 1982, or thereabouts, for years to come here. The room
clothing or cloaking a form is full of middle-aged women, marinating euphorically in multi-col-
ored sweaters and oversized bifocals. They sit at tables bobbing
walls we make out of concrete their heads, singing along to the music with civilized passion. The
cobwebs are of silk singer stands slightly apart from the other musicians. He has soft
both survive a wreck almond-shaped eyes, like those of a little woodsman who suddenly
opens his cottage door and looks out into the clearing. He begins to
the form of a poem, sing: “Tanta til Beate, hun bor i ei gate i Gamleby’n…”
a bridge, Outside the window, tulips grow in wooden boxes. Trolleys
towards a feeling pass through cobblestone squares. Birds perch atop the dim glow
of iron lampposts and call out into the night. The pointed roofs of
red and yellow houses glisten on the waterfront, countering the
drab glare of municipal buildings and department stores packed
against each other at the center of town. This is no small village. It
14
is a midsize city in Scandinavia, so far north of the American imag-
ination that it is perceived as the sort of storybook province exag-
gerated in cartoons. Some nights, across town, long-haired men in
leotards smash guitars in auditoriums. They throw puppies into the
crowd to be ripped to shreds, demonic screams of the apocalypse
echoing in high decibels up to the rafters. But now, there is no such
mayhem in the air. It is a quiet, cloudless evening. All are enthralled
by this single song, a lively jazz ditty in the style of Django Re-
inhardt, with lyrics rhapsodizing about the old days of the alpine
North.
As the singer ends his verse, the lead guitarist steps for-
ward to take a solo. It is Lars Jonssen. He is twenty-three years
old, bony and handsome. The young man twitches as he strums,
the way musicians often twitch when they are lost in their playing,
a display of facial expressions and jerking motions that lead one to
imagine how they might perform in bed. For Lars, it is an upward
curve of the mouth, a clown-like rise and fall of the eyebrows, as
if he is trying to reach something up high. At night he dreams of
igneous rocks and stalactite formations, of looking through micro-
scopes and squeezing eye droppers over petri dishes. Yet, he is the
one who wrote this strange provincial song, the single track that
has somehow rocketed the band to success. It is a ballad about
his mother, who died when he was young, a lonely woman of the
old country often seen wandering the alleys, humming Django Re-
inhardt, feeding the birds. An instant hit since the moment of its
release, the song has aired several times a day on the city’s major
stations all through the summer. The band’s performance of it here
is being broadcast live over the radio. People listen to it now from
their kitchens, singing along and tapping their feet the same way
the women in the tavern do.
Down the street, a young woman walks through a tunnel
under a bridge. She is listening to the song on her headphones as
she passes a wall freshly graffitied with the word “MAGIC.” On her
way home from a costume party, she is dressed as Sylvia Plath,
wearing a ‘50s-style cardigan, saddle shoes, and a cardboard oven
on her head. In her satchel is a cassette recording of the melan-
choly writer reciting one of her poems. The young woman walks
into the tavern just as the musicians finish the song. The four men
bow in unison with huge smiles on their faces. The crowd whistles
and shouts in approval. Their cheers rise up and fade out over the
city, like balloons dispersing into dots through the air. The song is
over, but one can still hear its echo. It will be heard for decades
Fiction | Kyra Simone
15
across the universe of this town.
At some point in time, in no identifiable realm of the nothingness,
the two asteroids begin to spin off course. A massive wave of grav-
ity tilts them slightly, a minor detour, which, despite its minuteness,
wields the potential to alter the evolution of life. Soon, the two rocks
hurtle beyond the belt of their orbit, speeding towards each other
on the same path.
The explosion erupts across the silent expanse, an immea-
surable plane of darkness already studded with points of light.
These are ancient sparks, only echoes of themselves now, the stars
long burned out by the time they are witnessed from the ground.
The size of the blast is unquantifiable. It is greater than the nuclear
mushroom clouds that will envelope whole cities one day, burning
the shadows of the dead onto walls. The crash goes on indefinitely
through time and space. Its ruins scatter into perpetuity like an irra-
tional number. The collision is beautiful, an aurora in the darkness,
erupting with swells of neon light.
In the countryside just south of the city, Lars lays on a blanket in
the grass, looking up at the ghost impression of the moon. It is late
in the day. He is with the young woman who wore the cardboard
oven on her head that night at the tavern. She is dressed in plain
clothes now, with no auxiliary headpiece, but Lars still calls her Syl-
via. He drags his fingers through her blonde hair, as if stroking gui-
tar strings or the tails of comets.
Around them, the hillside is wooded with pines, scattered
with wild flowers and clusters of stone. As a child, Lars had a keen
fascination with rocks. He kept a collection of them in a suitcase
under his bed. He told his mother that if the house ever caught fire,
this was the one item he would take with him. He often imagines his
eight-year-old self jumping from the window with the suitcase in his
arms, landing in the field behind the house and running through the
woods to the top of a hill. There he would open the lid and bask in
the light radiating from within. Sylvia has a collection of dolls sim-
ilarly valuable to her, stored away in boxes at her father’s house in
the Italian Alps. She has been noticing Lars from afar for some time
now. She knows that he visits the library in the afternoons, where
Fiction | Kyra Simone
16
he spends long hours looking at geology compendiums. She has
seen him walking through the streets in the evenings, picking up
stones from the ground and throwing them into the woods. But she
never thought she would be the one to lay beside him in the grass.
Lars only returned home to the city a few months ago. He
has spent the last two years in Catalonia, studying painting. His
instructor is one of the world’s great masters, a famous mustached
man who once stood before a lecture hall in a scuba diving suit,
holding a dog on a leash as he used a pool cue to point at slides
intentionally displayed upside down, before nearly suffocating
within the constraints of his own costume. All of this to be liberat-
ed from the oppression of rationality, to show how a person must
“plunge deeply into the human mind.” Most of Lars’s paintings are
of rocks, atmospheric landscapes with strange symbols hidden
within them—a giant eye glowing at the center of a mountain, a pil-
lar of sandstone in the shape of a femur. Painting has come to him
as easily as music has. At the age of twenty-three, he has already
had many exhibitions.
As the afternoon begins to wane, Lars and Sylvia decide
to “go for a tumble” in the field by the lake. Sensing his own confi-
dence wane, Lars tosses his spectacles into the meadow so that he
won’t be tempted to turn back and leave. He and Sylvia spend quite
some time looking for them, before finally giving up the search and
having their way with each other in the grass. Blended into the
landscape, the transparent lenses lay poised invisibly in their deli-
cate wire frames just a few yards off from Lars and Sylvia’s bodies,
magnifying insects crawling through the summer weeds.
When they return to the blanket, Lars and Sylvia are fam-
ished. Lars turns on his side to slice the strawberries they have
picked from the woods. As he chops the stems off the fruit, a tiny
speck on the edge of the knife catches his eye. It glitters brightly
as he turns the blade in the sharp sun. He wipes it off with a napkin
and feels it between his fingers, a particle with many edges, neither
rough nor smooth. Carefully, Lars slides the speck into a matchbox
and puts it in his pocket.
As the explosion continues, the spectacular display casts illumina-
tions that no one will see. There are no fields of satellites to detect
the whispers of its imprints, no civilization yet in existence to chart
its course. It is many years still before any human being will view
Fiction | Kyra Simone
17
the heavens through a telescope. First, ages of both fire and ice
will erode majestic rock formations and render entire species ex-
tinct, creatures so outlandish that children won’t believe they ever
existed. Now, the sky has no memory, no record of itself. Meteors
descend without reference to the stars that fell before them. There
is no telling that eventually, science will allow for examinations in-
distinguishable from ultrasounds, that asteroids will be tracked on
monitors buzzing with incandescent lines. The masses of light will
resemble embryos floating through amniotic fluid, colliding in ob-
scurity toward some return to the uterine depths of an enclosed
world. In films, explosions such as this will be depicted as disas-
ters narrowly escaped by attractive protagonists. Traffic will stop
as people get out of their cars to look up, stunned by the flash of
armageddon on the road before them. The films will play in theaters
full of people on the verge, looking in all directions for some sign of
a horizon, no longer even dreaming that needles in haystacks can
be found.
But now, the light is gone as soon as it appears, vanished
from the sky as though it has never been there, like an hour that
passes in a house where no one is awake.
In the top half of Lars’s painting, an expanse of mist floats through
the cliffs, as two figures climb down a ladder into the tunnels of a
Jurassic seashell miles from water. The colossal shapes of body
parts and household objects are hidden in the crags of the land-
scape—a telephone jammed between two rocks, an elbow emerg-
ing from the ground as an arch of stone, all swept with the brush
strokes of a mystic twilight. Beyond this, the scene is desolate, an
empty plateau ringing with stillness, as a fluorescent wind blows
through the hollows, scattering tumbleweed skeletons of sea
sponges across the land.
In a cavern below the ground the two figures walk through
the darkness, a teenage girl and a man with a hat. She is the type
who often wears black, but today she suddenly appears to him as
if wrapped in luminous mauve, like the electric silhouette of a jelly-
fish pulsing through the deep. Her companion is much older, gray-
haired and going along slowly, still holding onto his hat despite the
windless subterranean altitude. He is not the girl’s father or lover or
uncle. Not abductor or teacher or stranger or friend. They took an
elevator dozens of flights beneath the surface to get here, down
Fiction | Kyra Simone
18
to a strange tenderness they will never know again. For this hour
spent walking together below the ground, their shapes are barely
visible to each other in the darkness, and yet, they both feel like
they are soaring from a trapeze through the clouds. Here and there
along the floor is a single glowing dot, dimly signaling the way of a
path. Drops of water occasionally fall from above. They precipitate
from the tips of stalactites that hang overhead and are countered
by the same shapes of rock growing from the ground, the mirrored
forms reaching towards each other like teeth.
This is a real place that also exists in the mind. When the
man was a teenager, he saw it on television in black and white. The
man has been to all the places he’s seen on television but this one.
It is his last stop to the outposts of a childhood dream, to which,
for whatever reason, he has brought this young girl with him. His
steps resonate as they meet the ground beside her, echoing be-
tween their bodies like an arrhythmia of the heart. When all the
lights go out, the girl reaches for the man’s hand—not because ei-
ther of them are frightened of the dark, but because she knows the
man wants to reach out for hers. Somewhere beyond the caverns,
a Django Reinhardt song is playing. As the two figures approach the
exit, the song grows louder. When they come to the mouth of the
cave a boat is waiting for them. They step onto it and it floats into
the air. As they paddle through the clouds into the distance, the girl
takes an apple from her handbag and cuts it in half, slicing it hori-
zontally to reveal the star that is hidden at the center. She shoves
one half of the fruit into the man’s mouth, then places the other half
in the sky. A pigeon flies past and carries it off in its beak, disap-
pearing into the distance, a glowing array of unreachable metallic
dots.
It is a deep cerulean midnight. As the face of the clock be-
gins to melt into the evening, Lars sets down his paintbrush, giv-
ing the two figures on the canvas no certain destination. Sylvia is
asleep in the bedroom. In the past few years, she has developed a
habit of falling asleep long before him. Lars often leaves her there
to paint in the wee hours. He stops his work now to put on a Frank
Zappa record, returning the Django Reinhardt back to its case as
he walks to the other side of the room and leans his head out the
window, taking a swig from one of the syrup bottles he keeps on
the high shelf to help him stay awake. A quarter moon shines over
the town, the single point of light, suspended in the sky as an unfin-
ished shape. At this time of night, it is only the people coming home
late who will see it, looking up from the ground as they walk alone
Fiction | Kyra Simone
19
to their houses, glimpsing it in the space between the trees.
The asteroids disintegrate instantly into two obliterated wholes. But
the residue of the explosion perpetuates for eons, dissolving slow-
ly, as if pigment in a bucket of milk. Some of the debris falls to the
earth. Some is lost, dispersed into thin air or sunk to the bottom of
the ocean. Some clings to other particles in space and develops
into new entities. Entire planets have formed on less commotion,
rocky lunar landscapes created out of wreckage, from discs of rub-
ble swirling around young stars. As the fragments of rock enter the
atmosphere, they ignite with color and blaze in arcs through the
sky, perhaps seen for a moment by some prehistoric tortoise, who
will attach no sentiment to the sight.
The days pass on through their own oblivions. Coperni-
can men wander the earth, walking through dark corridors in long
robes, reading manuscripts by candlelight. Aristocrats stand on the
hillsides holding umbrellas, unaware of how they will be immortal-
ized in pointillist masterpieces someday, reduced to a mass of dots
the size of punctuation marks or the inner iris of an eye. Years in
the future they will be mistaken for grains of sand, written off as lint
settled on the scalps of sleeping vagrants.
Lars stands on the roof at noon. The day is quiet. A block of clouds
hangs still on the air like an impressionist bowl of cauliflower. Below
is a vast panorama of metropolis. The cars pass through it, rushing
with the sounds of a river in the distance. Lars and Sylvia have been
married for more than two decades now. They have four children.
Sometimes Lars asks if he can climb onto the roofs of the build-
ings where they go to school. He has spent the better part of the
morning up on his own roof shuffling around on his stomach, his
hand wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag as he clutches a magnet
and pans the surface with it. He is often found doing this at odd
hours throughout the day, a strange activity he has been devoted
to for years. Successful as Lars is, the life of a musician allows for
many idle hours between gigs and rehearsals. Still fascinated with
rocks, he sweeps the rooftops with his magnet, looking for some-
thing he can’t quite put his finger on, but which he has been in
search of since he was a young man. Over the years he has scoured
Fiction | Kyra Simone
20
the gutters throughout the entire neighborhood, sifting obsessively
through the dirt and fallen leaves, the animal refuse, the trash and
debris. He is determined to uncover some revelation of science,
the trace of some phenomenon in the everyday dust. “There’s that
crazy Lars,” the old neighbor women say as they pass him with
their grocery caddies. “You’re famous! What are you doing in the
garbage?”
Today is no different from the others. Lars is on the roof
again, searching the surface with his magnet. “Don’t tell your moth-
er I’m up here,” he says to his daughter, Astrid, home from school
on the pretense of feeling ill. Stepping out of the opening that leads
down into the house, she brings her father a plate of fruit. In the
summers, Astrid lies naked on the roof. She climbs up in her bathing
suit and lays a blanket down on the hot black tar. Then, when she
believes no one is looking, she removes her bikini top. She has seen
teenagers do this in movies about California. The image is more
liberating than the act itself. In reality, it is blindingly hot beneath
the direct path of the solar rays. The rough layer of tarmac burns
against her bony shoulder blades, and as she lays there perspiring,
she can never quite convince herself that no one can see her.
Lars has seen other women at such sport from these
heights. Over the course of his ten years of sweeping the rooftops,
he has witnessed a range of clandestine activities. There have been
glimpses of fleeing burglars and high altitude drug deals, contor-
tionist chimney sweeps and critters running along the telephone
wires. On the very top of an old apartment block across the street,
he once saw two people dancing, waltzing in the moonlight with
crowns of flowers on their heads. He has stood up there in his bath-
robe on many sleepless nights, alone. Sometimes on windy days,
the weather vanes spin in unison for a moment, and Lars is remind-
ed of the pinwheel hat he used to wear as a young boy, how he
would flick the propeller as he jumped up from the ground, hoping
to be lifted off into the air.
Now in middle age, these boyish impulses remain. Lars puts
down his magnet and takes the plate from Astrid. He pulls a small
switchblade from his pocket to slice up the fruit for them to eat. As
the sun flashes in the glare of the knife, he is reminded again of the
picnic years ago with Sylvia and the mysterious particle that once
glittered on this same blade.
Fiction | Kyra Simone
21
Countless years after the last embers of the explosion disperse, a
ship sets sail on a voyage to circumnavigate the globe. Its mission is
to survey the ocean floor at depths never before explored. A former
navy ship, the vessel is stripped of its artillery and converted for
scientific use, installed with laboratories, cabins, and observational
gear. Before setting sail, the scientists on board pose for a photo-
graph on the deck. The sepia image shows a group of bearded men
in bow ties and tweed jackets, sitting soberly in chairs with hats in
their hands, like an audience at a funeral for a person that no one
knows. On the verge of scaling the deepest waters ever penetrated
by humankind, no notions of outer space enter the lead scientist’s
thoughts. His mind is a dark cavern at the bottom of the ocean, dark
as black velvet or a lake of tar. At this point in time, the ocean’s pro-
fundity is a vague idea, a measurement that is only assumed to be
unfathomable. Whatever the true depth, the scientists know there
is something within the darkness. This is why the ship has set sail.
It is propelled across the water fueled by imagination, by fantasies
of something that bears no resemblance to what exists above.
The ship travels for four years, spanning a distance of many
nautical miles, before returning to its starting point, a voyage many
on board do not survive, but which leads to the discovery of thou-
sands of specimens never before seen. At one point in the jour-
ney, the vessel drifts near an unknown territory, but it never gets
close enough for the land mass to appear. Jars are filled with clay
dredged from the ocean floor of the surrounding waters. Contained
within a single sample of it are fragments of hundreds of animal
bones, the remains of multiple generations of life, crystallized with
minerals accrued over time. Something unidentifiable is sifted out
from the stratum: “numerous minute spherular particles of metallic
iron.” After much study and analysis following the expedition, the
spherules are estimated to be deposits from the stars.
Lars empties the contents of the sandwich bag onto a tray in his
study. He spreads out all that he has collected from the roof, pre-
paring to examine each speck of the day’s findings under his mi-
croscope. Lars has been through this countless times before. He
knows that the entire pile of dust will most likely amount to noth-
ing but a few dull fragments of ordinary metal. As he begins the
process of sifting through it, he thinks of all the outlandish things
that have famously been found in the trash—severed body parts
Fiction | Kyra Simone
22
and bins of dead cats, antique baseball cards and dumpsters full of
onions, carelessly discarded diamond jewelry, million-dollar lottery
tickets, porn collections, expensive sporting goods and electron-
ics, bags of blood and feces, animal sacrifices. He even heard of a
person once finding an enigma machine used to decode messages
from the Nazis during World War II, and, hidden inside a picture
frame that had been put out on the curb, one of the original copies
of the American Declaration of Independence. But no one has ever
discovered what Lars is looking for, not in the trash or anywhere
else on earth.
Today, before he begins the familiar tedium of examining
the dust, an exhaustion comes over him that is deeper than the ex-
haustion of most days. Lars sits down for a moment in the armchair
by the window. As he lays his head back, the song comes on the ra-
dio in the other room, his band’s first single from the 1980s, that in-
stant hit effortlessly ejected from his being into the universe when
he was twenty-three years old. It still plays occasionally on certain
stations. The whole country has heard it over and over again. Now,
decades later, for the first time in a long while, Lars closes his eyes
and listens to it, thinking of his dead mother, who didn’t live long
enough to hear it once. As his eyelids grow heavy, the song drifts
through his head: “Tanta til Beate, hun bor i ei gate i Gamleby’n…”
The lyrics tell of a young woman who lives alone on a street
in the old town. Lars can see her in his mind now, making her way
down the steps to feed the pigeons with a sack of stale bread, as
under the shadow of the man’s hat she was often known to wear,
she walks through the clouds of tobacco smoke puffing out from
the windows into the alley. When the bag of crumbs is empty, the
birds fly off and she goes home. She pulls the old gramophone out
from under the bed and puts on a record, chipped at the edges—
the real Django Reinhardt, not one’s memory or imitation of him.
As she twirls to the music, she thinks of when she was a teenager
and thought it was cheap to live here, with no voice yet crying out
to her from the bassinet. This town will never return to what it was
then, she thinks, as she draws the curtains and hangs the man’s
hat on the door. Nothing fluctuates anymore. All that is left from
those days is this old record. She turns it over and lets the music
play again, then pours herself a cup of black tea with milk. The
two liquids swirl against each other without dissolving, like a wisp
of silver in a spiral galaxy. Someday, she will leave the town, too.
“What will the pigeons do then?” she says to herself, as she leans in
the doorway, the sounds of the jazz guitar floating from the record
Fiction | Kyra Simone
23
player out the window into the clouds.
Nearly a century from the day the ship returns from its voyage, the
nautical depths it once charted are far exceeded by the heights
explored by a spacecraft that soars beyond the stratosphere. As
the door on the side of the vessel slowly opens, a single man in a
spacesuit drifts out untethered into the darkness. The man is im-
mortalized in a photograph taken by a colleague still aboard the
spacecraft, a snapshot of a lone astronaut hovering at a diagonal
height above the glowing blue earth, enveloped by an infinite and
impenetrable black nothingness. If examined closely, a tiny glim-
mer of light in the distance can be seen reflected in the protective
glass of his helmet.
Somewhere below, vagrant hustlers comb the beaches
with metal detectors, looking for gold beneath the sand amidst the
trash and syringes, the diamond stud dislodged from a debutante’s
ear, the lucky silver dollar fallen from a child’s pocket. On the same
street in Paris she jogs down every morning, a middle-aged woman
finds a necklace on the ground made of 14 karat gold. In the Hol-
lywood Hills, an old man walking his dog stumbles upon a severed
head in a bag. In the sky above him, a kid on an airplane locates
Waldo on a page of infinite figures dressed in red and white stripes.
“The best place to hide something is in plain sight,” says the de-
tective in the black and white film projected onto the screen at the
front of the aircraft cabin.
Lars has been listening to Frank Zappa and Django Reinhardt re-
cords all afternoon. After hours of examining indecipherable shapes
under the microscope, he takes a final look. Beneath the lens is a
tiny silver globe, jagged and patterned with shiny black rings at
one end of it, cratered like a piece of crystal or aquatic rock. To the
naked eye it is barely visible, a minuscule dot slightly faceted when
felt between the fingers, not unlike the glittering speck Lars caught
sight of on the edge of the knife in the countryside so many years
ago.
Using a pair of tweezers, he places the particle in a small
glass vial, which he will send to the lab in the morning, one of many
vials he has sent to many labs over the years, always returned to
Fiction | Kyra Simone
24 25

him, if answered at all. Months from now, after the contents of this
vial are thoroughly tested and examined, a group of scientists will
determine it to be the first micrometeorite discovered on earth, a
microscopic fragment from a collision of asteroids that took place
in outer space billions of years ago, carrying with it secrets of our
early solar system.
Of the 100 tonnes of celestial dust dispersed each day, dis-
carded from an infinite number of stars and asteroids that have
collided or passed through the sky at many points in time, a debris
that travels the course of light years and millenniums before it is
scattered across the earth, to be deposited invisibly on the heads
of people in the streets, mixed in with innumerable grains of sand
on beaches, topping mountains of trash in industrial wastelands,
and flung from bed sheets hanging to dry onto rooftops in towns of
moderate size, a single particle of it has been found by Lars Jons-
sen.
But this evening, Lars does not know that he has found any-
thing, just as he does not know for the life of him what became of
the matchbox containing that first confounding speck that prompt-
ed him to begin this obsessive search. Tonight, like many nights, he
will go to bed thinking another day has passed without discovering
it, that when he dies people will say he was a handsome and suc-
cessful man, one who appeared to excel at everything, yet failed
to arrive at what he was truly looking for. As he gets under the
sheets and turns out the light, the song is still ringing through his
head. It occurs to him that the pinnacle of his life may have already
passed—that single melody—a triumph that struck early and had
taken no effort. Perhaps there is nothing left for Lars to do now but
close his eyes and replay visions of his mother in perpetuity, danc-
ing in the living room to Django Reinhardt as she did when he was a
boy. Perhaps he will drink too much from the wrong bottle of syrup
and never wake up the next morning—to begin the search again or
know what he has found.

Art | Arushee Suri

Landscapes of Dreams
Fiction | Kyra Simone and Distant Memories | 2022
26 27

Art | Arushee Suri Art | Arushee Suri

Landscapes of Dreams Landscapes of Dreams

and Distant Memories | 2022 and Distant Memories | 2022
28 29 Poetry

Dr. Patricia Falkenburg

enantiomeric
response
you’ve got to forgive me . me so old now . and no idea still . you know . so old
. and not knowing anything . of life really . studying all my life . still knowing
not . a single thing . that comes from living . behind the mirror . all the time .
behind . or maybe . was it in front . of the mirror is the same . as stretched-
out . in the plane of glossed glass . when i look in the mirror i . see no-one but
. myself . you see no-one . so what . shall i ever know . when what i see is .
nothing behind . nothing through . nothing in front . self flattened . to
oblivion . to memory . in a plain pane . glossed with yesterdays . and that’s
how . i know nothing . that’s why . that’s how . you know . forgive me

Art | Arushee Suri

Landscapes of Dreams
and Distant Memories | 2022
30 Creative Nonfiction 31 Creative Nonfiction

Esther Heller She always made time to jot down notes, to document moments
of her Black life. It was an act of self-preservation, a way for her to

Points
tell her story, and to pass it on to her children and others. Many of
our Polaroids have notes scribbled on them, like one picture of my
younger brother sitting beside a radio that reads My Son Loves that
Radio.

of Memory
My mother always knew that it was important to tell her story
through writing, note-taking, doodles, oral stories. As a Kenyan
woman living in Germany, she knew that she could not rely on history
to plot her story for her without erasing all the points of history
that she had touched. Most of the things that I know about my
mother were told to me by other people.
Her desire to document her life and our lives was important then as
it is important now [she had to, she knew ]
There is no data [she had to, she knew ]
Katharina Oguntoye, May Ayim, Raja Lubinetzki, and others told
their stories through poetry, art, traced history [they had to, they
knew ]

30

My mother…a nurse, a Black woman working at the flea market,

hair braider, postal worker, cook, dancer, party planner, an aspiring
painter, a singer at weddings…

Malaika
Nakupenda Malaika
Malaika
Nakupenda Malaika

When my mother was twelve years old she was adopted by a va- Mama, did you ever read Farbe Bekennen?
cationing German couple—who saw her working as a hair braider
on the beach.
Papa often told me that during my birth you were in incredible pain,
She loved to dance and would often go out on her own. One of her so much pain that you grabbed his hand and climbed out of the
friends, whom I call Uncle, told me once while we were dancing hospital bed. You dragged him and said that if they do not care for
at a family gathering that my Mama could not be taken out of her you then you will jump out of the window and we all three will die
element when she was dancing. Everyone in the club knew that. die die—
Those who did not would try to approach her, but the DJ would
shake his head and say, Hey man you have no chance, she dances
on her own.
32 33

“I need you to hear me verstehen sie mich?” “Ja.”

I am looking for image and
in the end they cut you text arrangements—
cut open in that place there are many different
where your hand rested combinations of both
in New York City for the first time that do linear time and tell
my flesh forming in your womb of otherwise possible,
then a suture holding vocalise a memory to understanding. One
held in held in time, while walking under the trees and watching
the shapes formed between the almost touching trees,
in that almost touching space, I heard May Ayim say,
I want to be understood I want to be understood
I want to be understood
I want
to
be
un de r st
o
WOMAN JUMPS o
OUT OF WINDOW WITH BOYFRIEND DURING BIRTH DELIVERY OF d
HER BABY WOMAN JUMPS OUT OF WINDOW WITH BOYFRIEND
DURING BIRTH DELIVERY OF HER BABYWOMAN JUMPS
OUT OF WINDOW WITH BOYFRIEND DURING BIRTH DELIVERY
HER BABYWOMAN JUMPS OUT OF WINDOW WITH BOYFRIEND
DURING
Mama, I have started using my middle name, Kondo. Joel told me
that Kondo means basket, but also something that holds all the siri.
I imagine being in the city with you sometimes now, Mama, Secrets of everyone, something that holds something, like a bank
us holding hands, me telling you some random fact about account.
a place where the ice cream is good, you asking me
something something. I looked for you in News From Home,
although you could not have been there during filming in 1977.
I am looking for an arrangement, I know that you made
arrangements—I hear them in the conch, the ocean in the static,
the silence your holy arrangement followed by every utterance

Creative Nonfiction | Esther Heller Creative Nonfiction | Esther Heller

34 35

After my birth, social services visited you, and they said that you
could not name me Kondo, since in their book of names, Kondo was
a boy’s name. They said that I will have a lawyer to represent me,
and that this was child abuse.

You said that this was not true your mother was called Kondo
they asked Papa if he was sure that I was his child because
women of my mother’s type…

You loved us endlessly and showered us with love as you did

yourself because so much
tried to cut us out but
you knew you knew so
you made
arrangements that will
remain sung
recalled in the static
sound

Papa says you never wanted children.

Is it true Mama is it true? My mother died a day before my brother’s fifth birthday, in Septem-
ber 2001. She liked to celebrate; she threw the best parties, she
But you had me and three years later my brother, who was also cut would gather people to dance and rejoice. I know that she wanted
out of you to celebrate my brother’s birthday…
Two C-sections
There is no data in Germany but reading data from—
I know Mama I know…

Creative Nonfiction | Esther Heller Creative Nonfiction | Esther Heller

36
The only information I ever found online of my mother was a heart-
felt obituary note that was written by her colleagues at the place
where she had worked,
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer and was too sick to
tell her story, she asked a white woman whose son was a regular
childhood playdate of mine to take some notes:
your mother was never a complainer,
she really was the strongest woman I know…
the last time I went to visit her,
she told me about how terrible the
hospital doctors and staff were treating her
…it was horrible
She went on to say that my mother had told her to write down ev-
erything that she was telling her, and to document and share it with
a media outlet.
Her green eyes rested on me,
but you know, me and her were never
that close. I did not share that story…
Creative Nonfiction | Esther Heller
37
Mama, if you had lived in the era of social media, I can only assume
that you would have documented your mistreatment at the hospital,
like Dr. Susan Moore, who posted these words on Facebook days
before she died, about the white doctors who were mistreating her
and not believing her pain.
Or like Mirrianne Mahn, who posted an Instagram live video in a
hospital bed with tears rolling down her eyes as she shares about
a surgeon referring to her as “the African” instead of calling her
by her name. She is told she can endure more pain, and should be
grateful that she is being treated in Germany and not in Africa, as
things would be much worse there…
When my mother was dying she spoke English, it was her dying
language. She did not want me to understand what she was saying
on her deathbed. I did not speak English yet, but my father would
say to her, You know she can understand you, they have English
lessons now. Then he’d turn to me and say, Show your Mama some
of your English.
Hello, how are you? My name is…
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I l… you
I love you
My mama would mutter things in English but I remember only a
single utterance:
No… No… No… No… No…
[silence ]
In linguistics, utterances are units of speech that are followed by
Creative Nonfiction | Esther Heller
38 39 Poetry

silence. When she died all I said was… [nothing ] Ditta Baron Hoeber

untitled
What is wrong?
Nothing, I [mutter]ed.

In the word mutter, there is at once my mother and the silence.

Mut-ter. *Clap your hands twice*
I bend my arm and lean my head down into my open hand

and see that open hand as I once drew it looking down

I see my head as well lying at my feet

fallen down.

history is a story of no. followed by attempts attempts attempts success and sorrow. balance kept.

today’s photograph is almost it is only almost I will now make today’s photograph disappear
This I remember

my beloved mother Zippora

I think of death all the time. his. mine. the chaos after.

always took a picture made a note

stopping time dancing in memory

told telling the root of to count of recounting

recalling calling calling

tuning to hear her note again

Creative Nonfiction | Esther Heller

40 Poetry 41 Poetry

Sarpong Osei Asamoah Poem by João Luís Barreto Guimarães

If I go missing Natureza-morta com

don’t scold the trees,
guarda-chuva ferido
don’t say only if they were greener, mintier, prettier.
don’t burn a bush because it did not answer your little silvery email. O velho
don’t ask it to keep your secret. guarda-chuva preto não conseguiu resistir ao
don’t raise your voice against an empty page. vento fustigador. Ao vento
don’t cry. don’t you cry. com o seu insistir. Jaz agora fracturado
don’t bring me a wreath if it is not also a door. numa esquina do presente que continua a fluir
don’t mimic a bird mimicking god. (em direcção ao
don’t weep till time de-dogs. presente) tal uma peça que sobra de
don’t weep at all um brinquedo desmontado (não deixou
till you cannot tell the difference between weeping & leaping. de funcionar mesmo
don’t even for once forget: sem a incluir). O sol
I wake every spin-minted morning, castiga
fall into a forest of empty page; pela ausência. A mão agora é um guarda-chuva
If I go missing, save yourselves. (abrigando um pensamento) nas
batalhas os que perdem não falam nos livros de História
mas pelo que deixam
para trás. E hoje venceram as nuvens
(sem pressa e sem desistir) qual
enxame de gaivotas (que é uma nuvem de som)
polinizando a manhã atrás de
um barco de
pesca.
42 Poetry

Translated from the Portuguese by Calvin Olsen

Still life with

wounded umbrella
The old
black umbrella couldn’t quite resist
the wind’s excoriation. That wind
with all its insistence. Now it lies broken
on a corner of the present that continues flowing
(in the direction of
the present) like a piece left over
from a disassembled toy (that didn’t stop
working even without that piece
in place). The sun
wields absence
as punishment. Now the hand is an umbrella
(shielding a thought) in battle
those who lose do not speak through history books
but through the things they leave
behind. And today the clouds have won
(without haste and without surrender) like
the swarm of seagulls (itself a cloud of sound)
following a fishing boat
pollinating this
morning.
44 45

Art | Dominika Šimková Art | Dominika Šimková

Days Too Long | 2017 Days Too Long | 2017

46 47

Art | Dominika Šimková Art | Dominika Šimková

Days Too Long | 2017 Days Too Long | 2017

48 Fiction 49 Fiction

Roya Zendebudie for persian speakers is an interjection, used reflexively when the
speaker is hurt; it’s a vocalized pain.

Eye, ‫آی‬
1

Aye, Aye, Captain.

Look at
the word ‫چشم‬2 how The day I moved into my hometown I learned how to say ‫چشم چشم‬
it resembles the eye to my boss at the stationery store who threatened a wage cut if
how it curves and tears, then slides any part of my hair showed, ‫ چشم‬to the old man who pointed to my
down, dead. bike and then to his throat, mimicking an axe.

Hold it in your hand, the word, and what it is, turn it around, ‫چشم‬.
It’s not a word but the performance of a word, of what it wants to
be but fails, a failure so intense it bursts the word wide open: the
curve, barely begun, erupts and melts into points—light points,
rain drops: three up, three down. It slides, it falls. It’s the vision of
an eye, raw, open, slashed. Flooded into, rained on. Tromped and
thrashed.
.‫چشم‬
My body was a shield but it was also a weapon and they told me
I was nothing but that, a shield inside a shield. The banners read,
Each strand of hair is a string to hell. My body, then, could be a
ladder too, something in-between. Only it was not heaven I could
reach. Read that again.
Only it was not heaven I could reach.

It’s dead, which almost means it’s alive.

‫ آی‬،‫ آی‬Captain.
Each banner was a gun: one day a girl bled into a rose and her
Mein Gott, ich habe kein Dach über mir, und es regnet mir in die name rose up to our throats.
Augen.3
We were floating red.

Eye, I, Eye, I.
‫ چشم‬holds two meanings in persian, eye and yes, I will obey.
The latter, unlike the english eye, is not an I but a negation of an
I, an erasure of self for the sake of the other. The sound of eye
When I was ten I ran into god. God was peeling off, each layer
made of ash, of soot. I stood there for hours, watching politely
as god’s body turned into particles of dust. The dust circled me,
traced me, leaked into me. I coughed, once, twice, and then: I
coughed him out.

1
Pronounced the same as eye or aye.
2
Pronounced chashm or ČAŠM.
3
Quoted from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.
Translation: “My God, I have no roof over me, and it is raining in my eyes.”
50 51 Poetry

Trodding, hurried feet Poem by Tomaž Šalamun

One last, hurt ‫ آی‬- god’s hollowed

Sonet Giba
eye, collecting rain.

‫ سقفی بر رسم نیست‬،‫خدای من‬

‫و بر چشم هایم‬ Štorije, ki imajo prvi teren, drugi
4
.‫باران می بارد‬ teren, prvi rob, drugi rob, se vdajo kot
kepa mesa. Možgani drsijo in mlaskajo.
Radikalna svetloba je vedno mišičasta,
eliminira stanja, kjer se lahko ozreš.
In z njene glave skoči drug material,
nedotakljiv misli. In urni gamsi, ki v
skoku pokleknejo, police, ki so
konzumna raba zavesti in ostanejo
daleč zadaj, zavrejo njihov vonj in
teror—mošt. A ni več gamsa, kje je
gams? Vstal je kot meter, kot pojem
beline. Ne iščite tu, ker sem
izrekel. Tu dosledno ničesar ni.

Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

Sonnet of Motion
Stories that have a first scene, a second
scene, a first border, a second border, surrender like
a lump of meat. The brain slips and smacks its lips.
Radical light is always muscular,
it eliminates situations where you can look back.
And from its head leaps another material,
untouchable thoughts. And the swift chamois that
crouches mid-leap, ledges that
consume consciousness and stay
far behind, restraining their scent and
terror—musk. Is the chamois gone, where’s
4
The author’s translation of the previously quoted Rilke line into persian. the chamois? He stood a meter, like a notion
of whiteness. Don’t search here because
I’ve spoken. There’s consistently nothing here.
Fiction | Roya Zendebudie
52 Fiction
Lauren Schenkman
The Town:
Monument
Our town is considered a gem in a region with not much else to rec-
ommend it. Built in the days when people still knew where things
began and ended, it occupies a neat square. Beyond the eastern
edge is an empty field. That is where, to honor our town’s hun-
dredth anniversary, the council built The Town: a life-sized model
of our town, exact down to the smallest detail.
The construction took all spring. All the materials were
brought in from the outside. So were the workers. We saw their
RVs and trailers parked behind the half-constructed town. We saw
the smoke of their barbecues. The crew must have brought their
food with them, because they came into town only once, to Mrs.
Peralta’s store, to buy batteries. They did not speak or understand
our language, and told us what they wanted by pointing. When we
asked them questions they smiled and shook their heads.
House by house, The Town rose up. Along the eastern edge
of our town is the chapel, the school, and the water tank. In a mirror
image, on the western edge of The Town, they built The Chapel,
The School, and The Water Tank. On the main street of our town
is a hotel, a bakery, and Mrs. Peralta’s store. On the Main Street of
The Town, they built The Hotel, The Bakery, and a replica of Mrs.
Peralta’s store. When The Town was finished, the workers built a
tall white picket fence around it, so it could be locked up. Then they
got into their trailers and RVs and disappeared. Unanimously, the council members agreed: The Town was
Few people lined up outside the fence on The Town’s open-
ing day. Mostly we stayed home. We did not think much of the mon-
ument, and we were angry that the work had gone to foreigners.
But on the second day, there was a long line outside the fence.
Those who had gone on the first day had told their friends and
family all about The Town, and now everyone wanted to see it. In
our excitement, we trampled the lilies in front of Mrs. Peralta’s Store
and tracked mud up the white steps of The Chapel. So great was
the damage that on the third day, the council closed The Town for
repairs.
When The Town was reopened days later, the council was
53 Fiction
sure there would be less interest. Instead, the crowd of the second
day had told their friends and family, and so many of us lined up
outside the gate that the council had to declare a regional holiday.
After this, The Town was closed once again for repairs.
Again The Chapel’s steps were whitewashed, again Mrs. Peralta’s
lilies were planted, this time by a local crew.
Now the council called a meeting. They were pleased, of
course, that The Town was so popular. But this interest seemed
disproportionate, perhaps even of concern.
Instead of reopening The Town, the council members went
in one evening by themselves and locked the gate behind them.
They walked The Streets and inspected The Houses, trying to de-
termine why we loved it all so much. Just as they’d hoped, The
Town was an exact replica of our town. The workers’ attention to
detail was astonishing. The Library was exactly the right shade of
green. The Chapel’s roof was tiled with the same curved red tiles as
the chapel in our town. The wrought iron lampposts on Main Street
were identical to those that lined the main street in our town. They
even glowed the same pale yellow-white.
The council immediately saw the problem. The Town was
charming. It was beautiful. And it was even more charming and
beautiful than our town itself.
But how was this possible? the council members wondered.
The Town was, after all, a mere replica. As a test, the council mem-
bers stood in the middle of The Town, on Main Street, in front of
Mrs. Peralta’s Store, with their backs to our town. The Town’s hous-
es and shops, lit gently from within, were so lovely that the council
members were moved to tears. And it was very easy to feel the old
town—that is, the real town—ceasing to exist.
The council members walked out the gate and crossed the
narrow strip of grass between the two towns. They stood in the
same spot, in front of Mrs. Peralta’s store, the real one this time,
and looked at our town.
dangerous and must be locked up until further notice.
The next day at dawn, every single one of us had lined
up outside the white picket fence, waiting to go into The Town. A
policeman was sent to break the news to us: The Town would be
closed indefinitely. He fastened a heavy padlock on the gate.
We complained and shouted. We threatened and cried. We
had been dreaming all night of The Town. Of walking down its un-
ruined lanes and peering into its clean windows. We had longed for
daybreak, just to be able to see a quilt thrown over a rocking chair
in the living room of the House that corresponded to our house in
The Town, a candelabra shining on a table. The polished wood of
54 55

its front room, gleaming between neat curtains. dumping fees and get rid of an old mattress by throwing it over the
Finally, a small group of us left the gate and returned with fence. The rest of us soon followed suit with our junk. Although the
axes and saws. We cut a wide breach in the gate. We flowed grate- council claimed that patrols had been increased, the police never
fully in. seemed to catch anyone. Standing in the beds of our trucks as we
In The Town, the breeze blew in complex eddies. The lawns threw our garbage over, we could see enormous rats crawling un-
under the spreading boughs of cherry and willow trees were richly der discarded sofas and into broken washing machines.
dappled with moving shadows. The grass smiled like an old friend By the time summer arrived again, hardly any of us thought
who, though long abandoned, at the moment of our return opens about The Town. It was just a place where we could get rid of things
their arms to embrace us, without a trace of bitterness. we no longer wanted. Nobody was tempted to go there anymore,
Hardly an hour had passed before we began to plan amongst not even the teenagers, because of the rats, and the police patrols
ourselves. We must move into The Town at once, we said. We could were called off.
not bear the thought of sleeping one more night in our ugly beds. Our town is still considered a gem in a region without much
Then someone spoke. We never found out who. This person else to recommend it. Travelers on their way through stop to eat
pointed out the trampled lilies, the muddy steps. They said what we lunch at Mrs. Peralta’s store and admire the red-roofed chapel and
had all been fearing. sage-green library. The guidebooks say our town has preserved an
In response, a woman suggested a maintenance tax. We old-fashioned charm that so many other towns in our nation have
murmured with dislike. A man said we could take turns caring for lost.
The Town, ensuring it would stay in the beautiful condition that But, inevitably, before they leave, the travelers notice the
the foreign workers had left it. It might take painstaking work, but picket fence. It hardly stands out, blackened from years of rain and
weren’t we willing? soot. But still they insist on going there and peering through the
“Even so,” said the first person. gaps. The overgrown lawns are mounded with trash, the handsome
At the bottom of our hearts, we knew they were right. wooden porches collapsing from damp. The Chapel’s roof tiles are
The way forward was now very clear. Anguished, we turned cracked and thick with sludge. They come back and ask—what is
our backs on the dappled shadows and the smiling grass, and that place? And we, being upstanding folk with nothing to hide, tell
walked back through the gate. A group of volunteers, the strongest- them the story.
willed among us, boarded up the breach in the fence.
The next morning, a spiral of barbed wire was affixed to
the top of the picket fence, and two policemen were dispatched to
patrol the perimeter. The council had passed an ordinance: Anyone
who attempted to enter The Town would be shot on sight.
It was difficult to ignore The Town at first. Its warm lamps
seemed to beckon to us from the other side of the picket-and-
barbed-wire fence. Then, one summer night, a few teenagers
tossed bricks through the leaded windows of The Library. This was
denounced officially as vandalism, but the council did not investi-
gate the case too thoroughly. Secretly, we were all relieved.
Then autumn came. The trees of The Town shed their
leaves, which piled up and rotted, becoming a haven for raccoons
and possums. In winter, snow covered The Town. It buckled the
streets and ate the paint from the houses, leaving the sidings drab
and scarred.
One night the following spring, someone decided to save on

Fiction | Lauren Schenkman Fiction | Lauren Schenkman

56 Poetry 57 Poetry

Julia Ongking Guide Aguilera Castro

Why I Don’t Like Coming to NAIA Two Hours Early

because of the florid blur of travelers (who look
just like me) shuffling about bruising brown Manila
Extract from
folders that dampen under sweating fingers–
papers to tell the people and perhaps also
themselves this is who i am a mother of three one
Grieving over ashes
who only yesterday learned to walk & wrap her lips
around the word mama as the terminal (or Exercises on how
speaker crackles to life, calling all passengers
to please board the plane & i am reminded
as she looks just like my yaya who once stood
to disappear)
to board flight ETD423, warming the oxidizing
locket i had once laced around her neck, asking (3)
if she would ever forget my name. November
I’ll erase the spring out of your flowers
my yaya who i never saw again after a promise condolences
broken to bring her children middle-eastern dates
instead returned only to be greeted by a crying Go gentle
daughter and a son gone mute with grief left only Get cold
a faded five hundred pesos all dried out
by a mourning sun bearing down back in kuwait– You
You will think this is a lie
once, i stood in a line expedited especially for people like my father & his friends & i watched iterations of the woman i once
loved like a mother break their promises to their unknowing husbands & children. tonight, i will watch as a plane departs
from a philippine terminal, completing a one-way journey as it flies into the empty stars of a far-away place. one day, yaya’s
children will search, hopelessly, within these very stars. they will search for even a fleeting glimpse of their nanay & the
locket around her neck as the tv plays softly in the background, emitting the opening notes of the song they’d once been so
proud to sing. their hands tremble gently against their hearts as the man in the barong appears on the screen, denouncing the
use of a flatiron sizzling against skin or the other woman forgotten inside the freezer, as the children remain still searching
within echoes of ephemeral bodies, all shaped just like their mother.
58 59

Art | Veronika Cherednychenko Art | Veronika Cherednychenko

The First Week | 2022 The First Week | 2022

60 61

Art | Veronika Cherednychenko Art | Veronika Cherednychenko

The First Week | 2022 The First Week | 2022

62 Poetry 63 Poetry

Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi Katarina Gotic

Nō 80, ALKA
Lewis Street istok para sivilo misli
i misao je sada siva
east rips grey of all thought
and a thought is now grey

srećom ima još prozora luckily there are more windows

The house that built me no longer stands.1 & I am i borovine and conifers
beginning to understand the miracle of memories.
What it means to sit in nostalgia, & find your stool moj stol u uglu my desk in the corner
wizening into saw dust. This home where I learnt u povjerenju tiho confidentially quiet
the science of silence, performed December night : :
rituals—iná-ọlọ́hun & fire crackers crackling in the slab most a weak bridge
misty dark. Lafiaji’s red & white uniforming the fanti belutak, a white pebble,
charade. Polychrome masquerades on plastic dragons, on prepričava it retells
parading pot-holed streets. Insane peace in the disquiet. reku a river
Joy, a blackbird flying on winged costumes, without na on a
the hunter’s double-barrel cocking. The story mother dlanu palm
tells of a 20-foot-tall ìgunukó, street-lifting me, whilst
still a toddler. That one time I adorned the divine
ẹ ỳ ọ ̀-ẹtì hat & the white lace veil shielding the face
wielding the terrestrial ọ p ̀ ámbàtà. Entire ẹ ỳ ọ ̀-ẹtì, ẹ ỳ ọ ̀
-làbà, ẹ ỳ ọ ̀-oníkòó, ẹ ỳ ọ ̀-bájúlayé & the drooling àdìmú,
one white river flowing through Lewis Street towards
Racecourse. Clenched canvases of ẹṣin funfun
Racecourse heralding secrets unspooling only in
the light of the initiated. But that was before
the flood. Before the world ended & begged a new
genesis. Before the quit notice. Before mother &
sisters & I left the single-room apartment with falling
-inwards-ceiling, in the over-populated face-me-I-slap-
you compound, & all its fanti charades & polychrome
masquerades & plastic dragons & pot-holed streets &
mother’s sigh everytime the lawyers threatened to
demolish the over-populated face-me-I-slap-you house.

1
The house that built me is the title of a poem by Godwin Adah
64 65

alka alka
kad saberem tebe i sebe if i sum you and me sve okolo everything around
bratstvo i jedinstvo brotherhood and unity zapaljivo flammable
i and branivo to be defended
male junake velikog rata small heroes of a big war
neću ti dati mnogo I won’t give you as much ali but

ali but ne tuguj, streljana devojčice do not grieve, my shot little girl
moja zemlja se rađala my country was being born
hvala vam na prostoru thank you for the space
čak i da je even if pravedna just
sva kiša all rainfall
užad becomes rope između nas between us
tek only
zima winter
i and
drugo lice another face

igralište noću a playground at night

slobodni sati, takoreći the off-hours, so to say
uvijek su padali they all fell
u isto vrijeme at once

Poetry | Katarina Gotic Poetry | Katarina Gotic

66 Fiction
Ajay Kumar
If in the Way
of Time
When Kritika texted Aman, it’d been a week since the college was
forced to shut down due to the looming pandemic. While on his way
to meet her at Chai Corner, Mr. Nair’s sky blue scooter approached
him at the speed of a shopping cart. Mr. Nair was helmetless and
maskless and had a plump watermelon tucked between his legs as
if he had just given birth to it. As the scooter curved towards him,
Aman took deep breaths to massage the bitterness that he knew
would inevitably bubble up in his voice when he had to tell Mr. Nair,
once again, that he would pay the due rent in a couple of days. But
the face that greeted him was suffused with warmth, told him that
Soumya would be here in a few minutes and that the three of them
would have dinner together. Aman nodded, astonished at how the
arrival of his daughter had changed Mr. Nair.
Only a week before that, and not for the first time, Mr. Nair
had stood sentinel near his secondhand Alto. Its chrome-red paint
flaking off, windshield lathered with dust, wipers that had ceased
functioning; the only highlight of the car being the bright orange
Angry Hanuman sticker on its back glass. Mr. Nair stood there,
watching the kids playing cricket nearby, and when the ball rolled
into the radius of his parking space he would seize it as if it were a
grenade that had tumbled into his territory. When a parent would
ring his door, tell him to return the balls, let the kids play for god’s
sake, he would refuse in a cold legal tone that was impossible to
answer without losing some part of one’s soul.
The parents left mumbling curses, not mincing words on
how nobody likes him, how he’s an old man with no visitors, how
his own family had abandoned him. Will you take all this with you
when you die, they would ask, and he would reply that yes, yes
he would, and that the afterlife would only have what life had had,
nothing more, nothing new. Mr. Nair never yielded and the kids
there stopped playing cricket altogether.
Aman would hear the same cold tone from Mr. Nair when
he asked for the return of his deposit money, wanting to go back
home, now that his college had closed, all his friends had left, and
67 Fiction
whispers of a lockdown became more and more audible.
When Aman’s pocket buzzed with a text from Kritika saying
she’d reached Chai Corner, he took leave of Mr. Nair who was telling
him in elaborate detail, with childlike eagerness, how he would turn
the fresh watermelon he’d bought into the freshest juice that’d ever
been made, just for his daughter. Aman chose not to confess that
he hated watermelons.
Aman walked on along the footpath around the campus
walls, watched the men in the biriyani shop shove rice and meat
into parcel boxes. Auto-rickshaws hustled with their meters down
and hiked charges due to circumstances. Aman sensed despera-
tion in their busyness, nestled within a city made hesitant to move
now. It’d been four days since the state borders were closed—sec-
tion 144 was even imposed in some places—but it all still felt like
protocol and not reality. After all, the handful of corona cases in
the state were found in people returning from foreign countries—
Oman, Ireland, Thailand—faraway places in geography textbooks
and the news. Even the Janta Curfew that had sent the country
clamoring two days ago, banging utensils together instead of their
hands, felt more a symbolic stunt than anything else.
When the road turned, Aman saw a small crowd gathered
around a tent where watermelons were stacked in a pyramid. The
vendor, a wrinkled man wearing a skullcap and a cream kurta,
seemed desperate to sell off his stock, hoping to avoid losses rath-
er than make a profit in such times. Aman guessed this was where
Mr. Nair had got his melon. Aman hated watermelons because of a
story his father had told him once when he was small. It was about
a boy who ate a whole watermelon in under a minute at the village
fair’s eating contest because it was the sweetest, juiciest thing he’d
ever tasted. But unknown to him the cursed seeds scattered inside
his body—in his lungs, in his belly, in his ass—and started sprout-
ing. In a few days, his skin had turned green, his belly bloated like
a balloon, and the inside of his eyes had turned red and mushy.
Aman’s father had left them when he was in class 10th but not with-
out planting this repulsion in him so that whenever he thought of
that wet mushy taste, he felt like vomiting.
Kritika was waiting for him, having dum chai and samosa. When their
eyes met she was caught in the middle of a ritual that she found
embarrassing but he thought was cute. She would break away tiny
crumbs from each corner of the samosa and put them in her mouth
in the order she had removed them; this cycle would be repeated
until nothing remained. Even if the last piece was a lump of potato
or a single pea she would divide it into three before consuming it.
When he had first seen her do this, he had told her that she looked
68
like an archaeologist, running her deft fingers like curious brushes
to discover or rescue some core fossilized essence of the samosa.
He ordered a regular chai, sat down across her, and told her it felt
good to see a real human face he recognized after nearly a week.
Kritika kept at her ritual while picking up the conversation where
Aman had left it dangling, holding it even though she could clearly
see he was lost in some other thought.
Whenever one of their friends would suggest they hang out
after class Aman would be quick to recommend CC because he
didn’t have to pay here immediately. Chai Corner, too, was jointly
owned by Mr. Nair, which meant that his bill could be added to his
account and paid along with his monthly rent, meaning he wouldn’t
feel embarrassed or guilty in front of his friends about not being
able to pay for such little things.
The money problems had doubled after his father left, even
though his mother had been promoted from assistant to supervisor
at the rural Anganwadi. It was a low-paying job but it was a gov-
ernment job and a government job meant security. In the village,
separations were common but divorce unthinkable, and so when
Aman’s mother wanted a divorce the gasps could be tasted in the
air in which they walked.
Despite the issues, his mother had insisted on sending him
to a good college in Chennai, hoping it would take him away from
the pettiness, far away from the tumorous gossip. Past savings and
a scholarship had taken care of the fees but he still needed to rent
a place in the city and he found one at a walking distance from the
college—Mr. Nair’s—not realizing that he was entering a swamp.
Now that his mother’s Anganwadi branch had been suspended in-
definitely due to the pandemic, her pay was delayed indefinitely
too. If the workers protested, the due salary would be fast-tracked,
maybe a small stipend would be promised, but the situation had
made protesting a criminal offense.
The second-hand bookstore Aman part-timed at was also
forced to cut him off when the only two profitable items—exam
prep guides and Tamil-English bilingual bibles—ceased to be prof-
itable; the former because of the rapid spread of large coaching
institutes and the latter because the owner’s wife had convinced
him not to sell them anymore.
Aman had confessed all this, for the first time, somewhat
ashamed, to Kritika, on the last day of college, when the news of
it closing down had already reached their ears, and he felt after-
ward, for the first time, that vulnerability might not be a matter of
Fiction | Ajay Kumar
69
shame but a matter of available kindness, that what he thought of
as weakness could also be a kind of strength.
Kritika had reached the core of the samosa and assimilat-
ed it into her mind-body-consciousness with a sincerity that made
Aman smile again. Mr. Nair had refused to return the deposit, the
six-months’ rent paid in advance at the beginning, because, ac-
cording to their agreement, it would be returned after a period of
one month after the payment of the last rent, after a thorough as-
sessment of the concerned domicile could be conducted by the
concerned parties, and after a suitable amount could be deducted,
if any, by the concerned parties after said investigation of the dam-
ages to the domicile, if any.
Aman had vented it out to Kritika, who became a safe space
he never had before. But he had told her that he still hoped to se-
duce the unyielding old man with his sincerity by paying the two
months’ due rent right away and returning home with the deposit
money in cash, which he and his mother needed badly, especially
now that Aman’s grandfather had also come to stay with them due
to his worsening health. Aman called for another chai and Kritika
got a bread omelet.
He was pulled out of his distractions when they started
talking about the virus, about the first death that the state had re-
ported today, as if his mind had been condensed to a point on his
body where the pain could be real and here and now, not imagined
and distant in time. Aman thought it’d all be over in a month or so
but Kritika, who was more aware of the world around her, guessed
it could take many months, maybe even a year. When she passed
him the envelope, he was talking about how strange his sense of
time seemed when there were no other senses of time to recal-
ibrate it with, how time flowed by a trust in some shared reality,
and how it clotted into moments only when severed by some need
or want. When he opened the envelope he found three crisp pink
notes of two thousand rupees each. Once again, all his thoughts
zeroed in on a point of his body, all his fancy flights about time had
landed on his fingertips brushing the cold money.
He realized he hadn’t noticed how she looked, what she
wore. He closed the envelope, handed it back to her, and observed
her in silence. Dark brown eyes set in a slender face, a tiny gemmed
stud on her nose, most of her hair tucked behind her ears, some of
it playing on her brow, and an off-white shirt over dark blue pants
with faint white lines on them. He looked for fancy labels but couldn’t
find any. An olive shrug over it all. It fit her; she was fit. There must
Fiction | Ajay Kumar
70
be a complimentary gym membership, he thought, at the gated
community she lived in with her family; her family from whom she
would have borrowed this money, maybe would have said it’s for
charity. When she extended the envelope again he pushed it away,
not violently, but charged with an aversion that she could taste in
his touch. She put it back, said some words, and heard some words
in reply. When she forked the last piece of her bread omelet the pu-
dina chutney oozed out, the mayonnaise bled. Aman realized that
what felt like kindness in Kritika’s gaze could also be interpreted
as pity. He didn’t walk her home even though it was just over the
railway bridge. He waved her a low goodbye as she walked past the
pole outside CC on which a flag bloomed in the muddy evening like
the flower stamped on it.
The night was settling in when Aman walked back. The phone rang
twice in his pocket before he picked it up. When he said hello to
his mother it was drowned out by the siren of an ambulance that
whooshed past him. He stopped her when she broached the sub-
ject of him returning, telling her resolutely that he’d come back as
soon as possible, but only with the cash in his hands, and wanted
instead to small talk, ask questions that were free from large conse-
quences—Did grandpa still listen to the radio all day? Did they have
their evening chai? Was it cold there?—but the answers reached
him only in fragments because of the weak network.
He could still hear the ambulance, which meant that it
hadn’t gone much further. He asked his mother what was for dinner
and she told him she was making his favorite fish curry, anchovies
with raw mangoes. The dish emerged before his eyes—the steam
swirling out of the pot like a warm whirlwind, the tingle scratching
the insides of his nose, the sound of it simmering on the stove like
a small hot spring, the tang dancing on his tongue—before it was
washed away by the siren and smoke around him. He cut the call
and felt himself dragged ahead by curiosity.
He saw cars and bikes struggling in the blue-red-blue-red
light to make way for the ambulance through the traffic. There
weren’t many vehicles on the road, so the jam must’ve been caused
by something unlookawayable. He witnessed the first signs of car-
nage—chunks of red splattered on the streets—but on closer in-
spection realized that they were nothing but watermelons. By the
time he reached the corner and saw the wholesale tent empty, the
ambulance had escaped, splashing its last light on Mr. Nair, stand-
ing dazed and shivering before the watermelon vendor. The sky-
Fiction | Ajay Kumar
71
blue scooter that had crashed into the pile of watermelons was still
down, its wheels still spinning slowly. He watched Mr. Nair hand
over his entire wallet—full of pink notes, much more than the cost
of loss—and noticed how it had silenced the man, who left instead
to help clean up the mess. Aman wondered if he could have cleaned
up his mess too had he accepted the money from Kritika. He helped
the scooter up and asked Mr. Nair if he was hurt. “I think I died,” he
replied, the first time Aman had heard Mr. Nair speak English, but
he didn’t look hurt at all. A traffic policeman, along with a few vol-
unteers, had returned the roads to their new normal stillness.
At 8 pm, Aman and Mr. Nair sat in front of the television, listening
to the prime minister address the nation. While waiting for him to
come to the point, Aman asked Mr. Nair what had happened when
his daughter returned. He silently scanned Aman with suspicion
but eventually chuckled and started talking, saying that he had just
added ice cubes to the watermelon juice when the doorbell rang,
but as soon as he opened the door he could see that his daughter
wasn’t who she used to be. Her skin was pale, almost green. The
way she looked at him with her ruddy, seed-like eyes chilled him.
She looked not like someone who’d come back home but like a pil-
grim visiting a foreign country to confess sacrilege. It lingered in
Aman’s mind: home. The prime minister was explaining that social
distancing meant staying apart from each other and being confined
to your homes. Aman wondered if he had anyone to stay with any-
way. He tried to measure the distance between him and his home.
Mr. Nair continued, saying she’d refused the drink he’d made her
because it was too cold for the baby. She’d opened the freezer and
had stuck her head inside, wearing such a short skirt that it ex-
posed the back of her thighs, which had bands of light and dark
green. She’d sat down on the dining table with her legs splayed,
displaying her belly, plump as a watermelon. With a large knife, she
made a tiny incision on her abdomen out of which a little red juice
oozed out.
Soumya wanted Mr. Nair to cut her open, but he refused,
flung away the knife with a clang on the floor, and pushed her and
pushed her away until she was out of the door and he could close
it on her. Aman became disturbed and doubtful. He had never ac-
tually seen Soumya, not even in pictures, and all he knew about her
was what Mr. Nair had mentioned in passing, that she worked in
Bangalore at an IT firm. Aman hadn’t given thought to it so far but
now he wondered how she could get here and leave through all the
Fiction | Ajay Kumar
72
travel restrictions.
Mr. Nair said he soon regretted his decision, and started
looking for Soumya on his scooter, finding her at the corner of the
street, curled up by the man in the skullcap, her belly waiting among
his other fruits to be sold and eaten. Overtaken by wrath, he crashed
into her at full speed. As he stood there, watermelon-dripping, with
no signs of his daughter, he had concluded that he had died. Aman
looked into his eyes for a hint of some cruel lie but found nothing
other than sincerity. He was sure that Mr. Nair believed what he
remembered to be true, but Aman knew that wasn’t the case.
Mr. Nair looked discomfited and started rubbing his chest.
The prime minister announced that the entire country would enter
a complete lockdown for twenty-one days and everyone would be
stranded wherever they were for the greater good of the nation.
Mr. Nair vomited all the melon juice onto the plastic teapoy table
in front of him. Aman thought he could augur his fate in the seeds
scattered there.
He turned the TV off and went to look for a towel. While
wiping the table Aman remembered the time he had thrown up on
the school bus, how everyone had turned away from him, how the
teacher then gave him the window seat for the rest of the ride, and
how he had thought, and maybe still thinks, that the easiest way to
get to do what you want is to repulse everyone else into leaving you
alone. But now wiping the vomit away he felt it bring him closer to
Mr. Nair.
While dabbing Mr. Nair’s drooling face he realized that
he could remember things wrongly too, that the face before him
wasn’t as cruel as he remembered—it was a face that could infu-
riate but could still be reformed—and that the money that Kritika
had pushed towards him wasn’t actually cold but warm, meaning
that it was freshly withdrawn from an ATM. Aman realized he could
forget things too, that he’d forgotten how Kritika had mentioned the
small amount of money she’d made freelancing as a content writer,
meaning she didn’t have to beg for anything from her family, that
she just wanted to help him out because he needed help. Aman
remembered that he always forgot how his father’s eyes looked.
Mr. Nair’s eyes were already closed and Aman let him rest
on the sofa. Before going to sleep, he sent Kritika a song he liked
that revolved around the theme of apologizing but was mostly about
having sex and smoking cigarettes, both things he hadn’t done. He
recalled how both of them used to turn away in sync when their
friends would blow the smoke their way, turned away towards the
Fiction | Ajay Kumar
73
floor scattered with stubs, smiling at those that had come to terms
with their fires and sighing at those that still kept burning. She sent
him a song back.
Once Aman got used to the new avatar of Mr. Nair he started to
work out ways to take advantage of it. Time was embodied only on
the days that lockdown extensions were declared and otherwise
seemed to swirl around nodes of thought. And throughout, Mr. Nair
kept insisting that he was dead, that having been was the only kind
of being, that this was the afterlife containing only what his life had
had when it ended, meaning that his daughter was lost forever now.
The coldness in his tone had evaporated, replaced with brutally
sweet honesty. Once in front of Aman, he said he should’ve let the
kid off before he died. Once when the night watchman came for his
baksheesh he gave him a two thousand rupee note.
Mr. Nair always kept the locker cupboard open and Aman
could see the rubberbanded bundles of cash inside, alongside
old-fashioned broad golden bangles and a new-style choker neck-
lace with orange and white gems. There was no question of rent
either. When Chai Corner bled all its money, Mr. Nair patched it up
with his own, paying all the employees more than what they’d been
paid before, even taking down the flag from the pole, letting the
wide sky be its banner. It was clear to Aman that Mr. Nair wasn’t
lost in some darkness but was standing in the way of some blinding
light that made everything around him turn like shadows.
Whenever Aman wanted money he took it out of the locker.
He didn’t feel any guilt, felt that he was stuck here away from his
mother because of Mr. Nair’s uncompromising greed, but soon he
realized he didn’t have much to do with the money, didn’t actual-
ly want to do much with it. It seemed to him, and he assumed to
Mr. Nair too, that all the possibilities the present moment launched
eventually and inevitably curved back in to crash and burn—the
same serials and movies played on the TV, the earsplitting news
debates stretched the same trivial topics for weeks, the same dish
was cooked until the ingredients ran out—but Aman realized that if
one waited, with enduring attention, the trajectories of those possi-
bilities didn’t crash into their source but deviated slightly and orbit-
ed in slightly different ways, always escaping totality by a whisker,
like the rhythm of water dripping from the tap, like the shape of the
shaft of light through the window and the shadows it cast on the
walls; not newness itself but reminders that kept the possibilities of
newness alive.
Fiction | Ajay Kumar
74
After his mother had informed him of his grandfather’s deteriorat-
ing health, a fear knotted Aman’s heart about the worsening con-
dition of Mr. Nair. He finally decided to call Soumya. He found the
number on Mr. Nair’s mobile—an old keypad phone unlocked by
pressing the volume key and the asterisk button in quick succes-
sion—but she didn’t pick up any of the calls. He confirmed that she
was real when he flipped through an album in Mr. Nair’s bedroom.
When he couldn’t reach her in real life he looked for her name and
resemblance on the internet and found her profile. He sent a follow
request and she accepted, letting him investigate her timeline. Her
latest post was made months ago—a picture of a baby’s tiny hand
curled into a fist—captioned KK, the gift of our lives.
Scrolling down a few low-quality landscapes, he came
across a picture of her with a man. They were smiling and squinting
into the camera with snow in the background. It was geotagged in
Shimla and the caption had a snowflake. The person tagged in the
picture was named Areez Khan. When Aman texted her about the
condition of her father she left him at seen but didn’t block him,
which gave him hope that she’d reply when she was ready.
One day, Aman’s mother called him from a hospital, told
him that his grandfather had complained of chest pain. The coughs
in the call’s background pulled his attention away from what she
was saying. Despite having tried his best to avoid the news, it’d
managed to trickle in. He imagined the unavailability of Oximeters,
the lack of N95 masks, the impossibility of proper social distancing
in crowded wards, all hovering above his grandfather’s frail body.
Time felt real again. He now knew that it was late June.
The next morning, Aman was startled awake by the sound
of shattering glass. He walked out of his room on the first floor
and went downstairs to check on Mr. Nair but could not find him.
The door was left open. He rushed out only to return after realizing
that he had forgotten to wear his mask. Once masked, he went out
again, and found Mr. Nair with his head stuck inside his car. The
backglass with the Angry Hanuman sticker was completely shat-
tered. Because Mr. Nair had stopped going out of the house, the
kids had started playing cricket again. But there were no kids in
sight. Aman couldn’t be sure if Mr. Nair had broken it himself or
if the kids were just too quick and ran away. Mr. Nair pulled his
head out and said that he hadn’t driven the car for years and should
scrap it soon. His neck was bleeding but he paid no heed. Aman
decided he had to take him to the hospital, and not just to stop the
bleeding. He updated the situation to Soumya.
Fiction | Ajay Kumar
75
At the hospital, he could see by the way Mr. Nair’s eyes moved, er-
ratic as a child’s, that he had started doubting what he remembered
and believed to be true. While waiting, a cough in the distance car-
ried his thoughts back home, to his grandfather in the hospital, the
old songs he listened to on repeat, and to his mother taking care of
everything by herself.
Both his grandfather and Mr. Nair started getting better
once out of the hospital. The medicine brought a palpable differ-
ence in Mr. Nair’s behavior and even though his coldness returned,
it thawed out soon. Something different but still nothing new; Aman
decided he wanted to change that. He went and bought a meen
chatti, a clay fish pot. To season it he left it overnight soaked in
lukewarm water, coated it with coconut oil the next morning, let it
bake in the sunlight in the backyard all day, and filled it with kanji
vellam, rice water, for one more night.
When Aman texted Kritika about his plan, she accepted
readily, and he stepped into sleep softly smiling. He woke up with
a message from Soumya confessing that she was sorry, saying she
would call her father soon, and thanking him for reaching out to her.
Aman and Kritika spent the whole morning shopping, spin-
ning through unfamiliar streets, looking out for small shops still
open, because many of the supermarts had closed down due to
insufficient business. At the fish market, after struggling with the
pronunciation—netholi? nethili? that small one?—they found the
right anchovies for the dish. When they couldn’t find the right kind
of raw mangoes, Kritika decided to steal a few from a tree in the
neighborhood. They were small to hold, sharp to bite, and sour to
taste. Walking with her, he only wanted small things and the small-
ness of that want.
While Aman cooked, Kritika watched, leaning on the coun-
tertop, moving only if he asked her to hand him something. He re-
membered the recipe but still called up his mother to make sure he
remembered correctly. Under his firm hand, the mixer jar whirred
with coconut, chilies, shallots, and spices, grinding into an even
paste. He cleaned the fish; when the heads were removed the guts
came out too. The raw mangoes and the tamarind extract danced
over the shimmering anchovies as they boiled and simmered in
the pot. Mr. Nair decided to stop by, smelling something different,
something new in the air. When he saw Kritika his gaze hovered be-
tween recognition (having seen her a few times at Chai Corner) and
obliviousness, but he gave her the benefit of the doubt and smiled.
After a quick tempering with curry leaves and mustard, they all sat
Fiction | Ajay Kumar
76 77 Poetry

down at the table to eat. After mixing the curry with the rice, Mr. Barbara Genova
Nair stuffed a mouthful and exclaimed, “I don’t think I’ve ever had

he does self
this before.” Kritika didn’t need to tell Aman how good it tasted; he
just needed to catch the sparkle in her eyes. Mr. Nair laughed at a
joke no one else could hear. “Soumya would love this. I should call
her and tell her all about it,” he said. “I should call her back.”

help for men

he tells men: how to grieve
how to lose
how to cope
flirted with the title copium was talked out of it by a click publicist he still resents
                                            that was gold right why in the hell, did I listen
                                            that was gold right why in hell did I listen to the son of a dentist
                                            that was a great title      /       

                                                                                                                      / wait where he go

did he do it: eh, probably not

does it matter: reasonable doubt
he called his first memoir reasonable doubt
how about that! as if he wanted to get caught, you tell me
what he wanted to get caught for

Fiction | Ajay Kumar

78 Poetry 79

Allis Sääsk

sticky fingers
the smell of dish soap
I am in the car again
we are speeding down the highway
I wash the dishes and then myself
scrub until there is no soap left
I wash myself with what leaks from my hands
it does not foam

Art | Sonia Boué

Crip Time - Two Eyes | 2022

80 81

Art | Sonia Boué

Art | Sonia Boué Crip Time - Walking to

Crip Time - Clever Gretel | 2022 Grimmweldt | 2022
Rina Kenovic

blister partition
part 1

waking and around is a vast vast voidoïd

walking past human faces as open as branches as empty as branches as dry as winter-branches drydry sickle
and blist blistering skin blistering songs sung from the hollow of intestinal labyrinths
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
dddddd
ooooooooooooooooo
ïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïïï
ddddddddddd
this is a song for the vacant no notes only and romantic violins
on the branches birds sit &. weep the singing of passionate vacancy helps the heartbrake heartbeat
the touch of your hand has
broken

82 Poetry

part 2

drydry sickle and blist

blistering skin
blistering song sung from the hallow of intestinal labyrinths
blessd be the people blessd be blessd be
blessd be the hound-eyed dogs
bony lies &. eternity
as we lay upon the waters
dreamy ophelias and chinese-restaurant fish
globelous eyes staring fixedly at
twentyf irst cent uryh unger
whilst our skin popped! and gurgled
blisters singing like angels lair heavenly noises
celestial cries

with skin burnt and broken

chiseled hands searched for church
blackened canvas empty’s gold gogogogogogo
fingers stretched for thin fisherman’s bait
licking new religions & .
fool or . ?
in newnewneon strobe light

prayer

83 Poetry
84 Creative Nonfiction
Devon Mello
Ya Got Lost
in a Jet Stream
John Cusack stormed out of the final-cut showing of Better Off
Dead. He said he’d never work with Savage Steve Holland again be-
cause the movie made him look like an idiot. I wonder if that crossed
his mind while he filmed the scene in his closet, filled with cutouts
of his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, or the scene where he sticks Q-tips
into his face.
While performing on Italian national TV, David Lee Roth jumps from
a high rise, as planned, but the mirror ball had been placed two
feet lower than they planned. He once said he was “twenty-fuck-
ing-three. Stay up
84 for three weeks and you wouldn’t notice twen-
ty-three.” He jumped with “every ounce of that attitude,” and broke
his nose into the mirror ball.
We are kayaking on November 7. They call the election for Biden.
My father asks me if I told anyone about the conversation we had
at the bar. He tells me about the movie Chopping Mall, where the
security robots at the mall turn murderous.
My father showed me Better Off Dead for the first time when I was
eight years old. Many of the jokes went over my head, but for some
reason I was not fazed by the premise of a heartbroken teenager
failing, in slapstick manner, to commit suicide.
“…dying when you’re not really sick is really sick!…” says Charles De
Mar.
We watched Better Off Dead every Sunday. I would go to church
in the morning with my mother, and play the good Mormon, and
as soon as I got home I would shed my clip-on tie and pants while
my father made ramen noodles. I would sit in my underwear on
the couch and eat the best ramen I had ever eaten and watch the
85 Creative Nonfiction
greatest movie I had ever seen. Every week it was the same, and
every week it was the single most important event of my life.
There is a scene where the heartbroken protagonist, Lane Myer, is
working at a burger joint. Their slogan is “Everybody Wants Some.”
While he prepares the patties, Lane drifts off into a daydream and
becomes a mad scientist, summoning the burger to electric life.
The scene switches to a grotesque claymation of the Frankenpat-
ty launching into Van Halen’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” The patty
plays Eddie Van Halen’s prized guitar, Frankenstrat.
I never understood the animated patty’s hair-metal karaoke. I con-
fessed my confusion to my father, and his eyes lit up; a chance to
break out his 8-tracks. He led me through the winding history of the
Frankenstrat, of Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth (he hesitates
at the Sammy Hagar years). I was not impressed initially, but then
he showed me concert footage:
• David Lee Roth high kicking and thrusting
• Cocaine-Rockette-Elvis hybrid
• Eddie playing effortlessly—his fingers are a conduit
of his racing mind
I practice in the mirror:
• Flipping my hair
• Sliding my hand down from my neck to my crotch
• Kicking as high as I can
I understand the appeal of hair rock. In a different life I could see
myself in a Winnebago, living free. In a couple of weeks, my father
will introduce me to Ben Folds Five and Pixies, and I will abandon
hair metal for shaggy hair.
In college I will watch Better Off Dead for medicinal purposes. I will
be able to recite every line with religious precision, and understand
each reference. On Christmas Eve we will watch it as a family, al-
lowing that the one Christmas scene in Better Off Dead will christen
it a “Christmas Movie.” We will eat shrimp, drink sparkling cider, and
beat each other to the punch lines.
86
2017, my sister and I catch up at Fastnet. My sister nurses her stout.
I forget that tomorrow is Christmas, so I play a drinking game with
myself. She tells me about San Francisco and the tech world. I keep
my eye on some guys wearing Celtics jerseys going in and out of
the bathroom. My sister asks me about New York and I shrug. She
asks about my ex-girlfriend and I launch into a well-rehearsed tale
of heartache and betrayal, void of any self-reflection or account-
ability. She goes to the bathroom and I order myself another round.
I check my phone and see that the ex liked one of my posts. I show
my sister when she gets back and have a breakdown suitable for
this day and age. I delete my social media, take a couple shots, and
my sister watches me follow the Celtics into the bathroom. I come
back rejuvenated. She suggests we leave.
Before I depart for the Hudson Valley, my mother sneaks a Book of
Mormon into my bag and my father pats my shoulder.
A few months later I will return to Rhode Island and make my grand
return to Fastnet. I will run into high school classmates and we will
regale each other with tales of the last four years. I will exaggerate
my New York exploits to gain traction, but they won’t care, and I
won’t either. I will look down on them and the paths they have cho-
sen: staying in our hometown, working for their fathers, going to the
same bar every single night. They’re happy though. We drink until
someone punches someone in the face.
Sitting on the curb outside Fastnet. Cops take statements, but they
are not interested in mine. I come home shortly before 1:00 am and
sit with my father in silence. He does not ask about the blood on
my shirt. He asks me if I have ever heard this band before and puts
on Death Cab. We get donuts from Ma’s, the 24-hour shop across
from the church where, one day, I’ll go to noon meetings. We eat
our donuts and think of something to say. My father shifts in his
seat, trying to remember something from his own father’s playbook,
something Pa Walton would say in a situation like this. Instead he
tells me about the night he spent naked in jail. On the drive home,
he suggests that we hold back from telling my mother. He suggests
I try to stay out of trouble.
• February 14, 1986, and my father, twenty-three, jumps off a
Creative Nonfiction | Devon Mello
87
high rise and breaks his nose.
• September 18, 2018, and I’m twenty-three. I jump off a high
rise and break my nose.
• Thirty years apart, we share the same Pentax K1000 and
take pictures of ourselves drunk alone in our rooms.
I’m ninety-five days sober, Christmas Eve, 2018. My sister suggests
a different movie and we skip Better Off Dead. My father and I go
for a drive the next day after Christmas lunch to pick up a bike he
bought off Craigslist. We recite Better Off Dead to each other, in
lieu of a viewing.
“…I’ve been going to this high school for seven and a half years. I’m
no dummy…” says Charles De Mar.
Eventually we run out of jokes and are stuck with ourselves. “Good
work.” He tells me he used to celebrate every thirty-day chip with a
trip to the bar, until one day something stuck.
“…Don’t drink and go to meetings…” says my father.
I finish in New York and return, no longer prodigal, to Rhode Island.
I enter the world of nine-to-five and emails about cake in the break-
room. On Tuesday nights, I run a meeting. On Sunday afternoons,
my father and I get coffee.
I am alone, Christmas Eve, 2019. I eat brunch alone and the restau-
rant plays the same song, three times in a row. I go to my Tuesday
meeting and there are only four men waiting. A man twitches and
stifles his tears. An old-timer tells him that it doesn’t really matter—
showing up to a meeting hungover is better than nothing. I watch
Better Off Dead alone in my apartment.
By March 2020, the world enters an “unprecedented moment in
history.” However they frame it, the world stops and so do I. I reck-
on with a friend’s overdose. I get coffee with my father and finally
listen. I refrain from self-reflection.
On October 6, 2020, Eddie Van Halen dies. I see the news on my
phone while I help one of my preschool students fall asleep. I go to
Creative Nonfiction | Devon Mello
88 89

text my dad but he beats me to it.
“I actually never really cared for Van Halen.”
“Me neither.”
That Saturday my dad picks me up and we go to Dusk, a bar near my
apartment. DJ night, all funk music. We are both starved for social
gathering—anything, including funk.
We find a table outside. I order an N/A beer and he orders a coke.
The waitress sighs under her breath when she realizes: bad tips
tonight. The funk music has not even started yet. Footage from a
Van Halen concert, projected on the side of the building. We try
and figure out when the concert is from. They play “Panama,” and
in unison we both guess ‘84. Van Halen launches into “Everybody
Wants Some!!” and my father and I almost fall out of our chairs try-
ing to get it out of our mouths. The scene with the patty. “I once
made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee
condemned it.” It’s been a while since either one of us has seen it.
I turn my attention back to Van Halen and my father keeps his eyes
on me. He elaborates that he has never taken steps towards doing
so, but occasionally he thinks about driving his car off the road or
into the other lane. He has contemplated different ways and keeps
them in the back of his mind. His new tattoos, skinny jeans, ponytail,
emo piercings, and twenty-three-year-old sensibility. He reiterates
that he thought about killing himself recently, but he is not sure if
he would ever do it.
I was going to be a father. The second most scared was when I
found out I was going to be a father a second time.”
Home for the holidays, twenty-one and on coke, I shave my head
late at night. My father comes into the bathroom. “I get it man,” and
finishes shaving it for me.
Watching Van Halen, my eyes drift through the projection. My fa-
ther is waiting for me to speak. “I get it man—” I begin. Nothing else
follows. I say I’ve thought about it too, but things have gotten better.
I tell him to stick around, in case things get really good for me.
On Christmas Eve, 2020, I watch Better Off Dead with my roommate
and the girl I am dating. I do not think she laughed even once. The
conversation with my father plays in my head:
“…wanting to die when you’re not sick is really sick!...”
April 2021, my father and I are getting lunch together. We discuss
our family situation. He says he does not have anyone in his birth
family left. We take stock of each other. I tell him I got dumped. I’m
sick of “learning experiences.”
“I get it man.”
We compare our broken noses on the drive home. Outside my
apartment we shift in our seats and lightly touch hands.

I do not know if my father was ever a child. I do not know if he has

ever been embarrassed, or heartbroken. I look at him and he is not
my father. He is not the man with short hair and a scruff, who ate
burgers and screamed, who threw my shoes in the trash. Nor is
he the recent vegan with a beard and a ponytail, who vapes, and
sends me current music. Who is he? The photo of him, twenty-one
years old, working on his Plymouth. The other photo of that Plym-
outh: smashed with the windshield shattered, parts of the tree still
in the grill.

Getting ready to go to college, I’m eighteen and shaking. He says

“I get it man. The most scared I’ve ever been was when I found out

Creative Nonfiction | Devon Mello Creative Nonfiction | Devon Mello

90 Poetry 91

Mirjam Zeise People kissing and working

People doing everything and working

People sitting
People doing nothing and working

All forever
Just with

in strawberries
Work

and working
People sitting in strawberries and working
People having firework strapped around their chest and working
People guarding playgrounds and working
People drinking crémant and working
People burning and working
People beating up and working
People observing the oceans and seagulls and working
People gluing stickers all around the cities and working
People driving anywhere and back and working
People cleaning shit from other people and working
People stirring goulash and working
People climbing trees and working
People breeding sausage dogs and working
People running very fast and working
People cloning animals and working
People smashing window glass and working
People speaking many languages and working
People painting walls white which other people painted green and working
People deciding things and working
People coloring hair red and brown and black and blonde and working
People sewing up heads and working
People drawing flowers on skin and working
People screaming around and working
People blessing you and working
People shooting animals and working
People demonstrating and working
People holding notes in their hand and working
People signing and working
People walking many dogs at once and working
People eating popcorn and working Poetry | Mirjam Zeise
92 Poetry 93 Poetry

Abbie Hart Lemmy Ya’akova

four murdered by
LIKE A DOG
YOU SENSED I WAS EATING SOMETHING
BUT DECIDED THAT YOU DID NOT LIKE IT
meme: sonnet
these fuckin’ memes are gunna end my life I saw one
the bitter taste in my mouth just now I will describe it to you there is a girl in a ponytail
below you. you are its origin, its dr frankenstein, that which i will never see again. an x-ray of her brain which is broken down into five parts
labeled Fuck it up Run Sabotage Be a bitch Self destruct
the sour tomatoes will fray between my teeth like rope. flossing is not enough. I think of all the times I was jonesin’ for somethin’
i will not miss you. one word won’t cover how I got the door before the night
came in started fires in my wranglers let the world awake
my dead in the good god damned there is a lucid place
and because I have seen this god damned meme I know
we have all climbed its familiar sugar mountains to
the moon laid down in our own man made ditches
after shovelin’ shit into the sun someone dressed in blue
shells waits for my measurements I tell them it’s fine that
they have distanced themselves from me and it is I mean it
94 Poetry 95 Fiction

Constance Bacchus Rachel Herz

the breast water Nomenclature

balloons-gravity, gravity My father got the order of my names wrong when he registered my
birth. I used to imagine who I would have been as Andrea. I thought
the legs, freckled long, strong lace it much prettier, so I too would be prettier, or at least have a prettier
squeezing, pushing polyester life. It was a name people would be able to pronounce and spell,
out, anyway away uncomfortable slides the vagina all into layers & lips garbage & it’s always a name requiring no justification. No one would ever make fun of
about free speech Andrea. It was not until I was a teenager focused on resenting my
world that it occurred to me that they could have called me Andrea,
even if the birth certificate was wrong. I had been robbed of an
identity by their subservience to bureaucracy. It was not until I was
a young adult focused on understanding my world that I asked my
father why they had not corrected my names. He had no idea what
I was talking about.

I asked my parents, why Dina? What did this name mean to them? “I
don’t remember.” There were so very many things that they didn’t
remember. It was hard to know when this was true and when it was
code for “back off, this hurts too much to talk about.”

Dina is a biblical name. A mark of being a person of the book, but

I didn’t know that as a child. We didn’t have that book. Dina went
out to visit the daughters of the land, was abducted and raped, and
then avenged by her brothers. She then went out into the world
and was never mentioned again. There is a book called “The Tribe
of Dina.” The pages of this book are filled with the words of Jewish
women. Is this a satisfying meaning?

Many people hide their biblical names in second place, hoping no

one notices the smudge of invisible ink unless they know to hold a
menorah up behind it to reveal the pomegranate juice. If you use a
cigarette lighter, you risk burning the name to ash floating up high
chimneys, joining the faint trail of Sarahs and Israels across the
grey sky. My father made a mistake when he registered me.

When Charles and Di got married, we were given the morning off
school so that we could watch it in our time zone. It was still dark
when we sat there with our Milo. I remember Diana’s dress. Huge,
fluffy, off-white, like off-milk. There were still two princes to go.
One had attended school in New Zealand, tantalisingly close to
96
our town. I remember realising then that I was not eligible to be a
princess. I had not yet been confronted with the Jewish princesses
peopling US stereotypes. The revolution will not be televised.
Dino was the sweet pet that the Flintstones loved, like we loved our
pet Laika. It was nonetheless an insult when aimed at me. Context
is important. Later, my sister called her dogs Pebbles and Bamm-
Bamm.
Deena, Deana, Donna, Dinah, Dana, Ina, Doona, Dyna, Gina, Hine,
Tina, Sina, Dima, Dynah, Dayna, Diana.
I cannot imagine having a lover who cannot hold my name tenderly
between their lips. I have tried. Clumsy, cursory coming. Politely
staying one night.
“Like Dana International? That old Eurovision winner from the ‘90s?”
“Yeah.” She was bold, strong, in your face. I didn’t mind being mis-
taken for her. I bought her CD just to have her on my shelf. She
was not even European, but she made herself a crowbar name and
forced her way with furious energy into all those spaces that the
rules closed off.
But Dana’s time was brief. I hope that she’s now living with a plate-
glass ocean view forming rainbow prisms on her partner’s bald
head as they cuddle on the couch, watching reruns and drinking
perfect gin and tonics.
“Like Commander Deanna Troi?” “No, Dina.”
My father began calling me Dinah, like an American diner, not like
dinner. He acted like it was a joke, but we both knew it wasn’t. He
also began saying “ta” and “mate” and “gidday” and “kiwi.” It em-
barrassed me. He could not carry it off with his accent and his
short dark looks. He was neither tangata whenua, people of this
land, nor pakeha, people of the empire. It filled me with tender pain.
We mispronounced my mother’s food. When I was five, my best
friend vomited after eating griesbrei. I rarely invited school friends
for dinner and, if I did, my mother made roast chicken with three
frozen veg. It was very good, and no one ever vomited again. I was
protective of my mother’s food.
Fiction | Rachel Herz
97
We mispronounced our last name. And were embarrassed when
our parents wouldn’t. They would answer the phone with its gut-
tural sounds when “hello” was expected. We could avoid our last
name, because we lived in a country of first names, nicknames,
pseudo-friendship. My European friends shake their heads when
I tell them I would even call the prime minister by their first name.
They think I’m exaggerating, but then sometimes I am. None of
these friends have ever been to my past, so they can’t know. I now
live in a country of last names, of a distinction between friends and
acquaintances, where you are expected to answer the phone like a
roll call, and instead I still say “hello?”
I would introduce myself to strangers with the crisp, clear enun-
ciation learnt in speech and drama classes: “My name is Dina.” I
passed Trinity College grade 8 with distinction. An examiner was
sent out from mother England specially—not my motherland, or my
mother’s land. They gave me a distinction despite their expressed
distaste at my antipodean vowels. Most strangers would use the
wrong vowel back—“Nice to meet you Dana/Donna/Diner”—send-
ing a barrier up with a boing and a flash, like in a quiz show. It was
an introductory test most people failed. The successful contestants
I deemed attentive and respectful. For them, I was real. Or at least
realer. Having been indoctrinated into Anglo etiquette, I did not
correct the others. I smiled agreeably or sent passive-aggressive
messages they could not read or both. I now live in a country where
they pronounce my names more correctly than I do.
“Where are you from?” “New Zealand,” my mother would reply with
a stony stare, daring them.
Gru-en-stein, I said. At primary school we had to draw pictures of
our names. When the teacher stood behind me, looking at the blank
page, I said I didn’t feel well and asked to go home. Our parents
spat out a curly, raspy-R’d Grrrrr and pursed-lipped ew, a shhh in-
stead of a st. People did not recognise it as a name. In the long-
ago days of Austro-Hungarian colonialism, bureaucrats gave Jews
names as pretty as the bribery they could afford. My father would
tell this story, laughing that our family was poor. My mother scoffed
and looked away.
Dinah Shore was on daytime TV: Dinah, as in American diner. She
had no more to do with me than the Brady Bunch or Jeannie, who
Fiction | Rachel Herz
98
I dreamed of. Did I want to be her or to have her? With my own en-
slaved jinn, could I save my family? My sister resented our parents
for not being Bradys. I resented Dinah Shore for her, my, our name.
My brother began shortening his name. I resented him for betraying
our family.
Nahum buried himself in a box of words under the Warsaw ghet-
to. “I don’t know what will happen to me,” he wrote. “Don’t forget,
my name is Nahum Grzywacz.” So few memories. So many names.
There is a room of names under the centre of Berlin. It takes six
years, seven months, and 27 days to read them out, so they say.
Next door is a room of families.
I grew up and moved far away from my family. I reinvented myself
as Andrea. It was as though people were talking to someone beside
me. I didn’t respond. I gave up after two weeks. I would have to do.
My father bought life with his name, like The Little Mermaid bought
legs with her voice. In 1939, his parents smuggled him into an or-
phanage where he put on a catholic name. They never came back
to get him and he stayed until his older brother found him. By then,
his original name didn’t really fit him anymore.
I once met someone whose grandmother bought life with her
name. Her family was gathered around her in intensive care when
their rabbi came. He gave her a new name so that the angel of
death would not be able to find her. The angel of death is clearly a
short-sighted bureaucrat. Let’s hope that her name was unique so
that no one else died in a macabre case of mistaken identity.
When my brother married, his partner took our last name. I asked
her why. She had hated her family’s last name, MacDonald. Imagine
being a Gruenstein voluntarily.
A friend accused me of mispronouncing my name on my answering
machine. “See, stop complaining that people get it wrong, you do,
too.”
When I moved to Germany, people could pronounce my name. In
the first years, I would still automatically spell it: “Dina, D. I. N. A.”
People looked at me strangely. People did not recognise my last
name when I said it. Then they would see it written and be irritated,
Fiction | Rachel Herz
99
why didn’t I say that? It took five years until my mouth could make
a curly, raspy R, and now I cannot mispronounce it. My sister and
brother now resent it when I say our last name.
Once the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinta, announced in
parliament that she would not give a man a name. She gave him
labels instead: right wing supremist, racist, islamophobe, terrorist,
Australian. “He is not one of us,” she said. He was deemed unde-
serving of the privilege of a name. She punished him by denying
notoriety. May his name be obliterated.
New Zealanders could pronounce the man’s name, but most strug-
gled to pronounce the wall of names he killed, despite the flowers
they brought to mourn the dead.
It was not until I was an adult focused on other things that I met
another Dina. I was shocked that there was a whole world of Dinas
I had never dreamt of. I was normal, common, a fashion victim of
the mid-’60s world my parents had fled from, only I wasn’t. I envied
the other Dinas their comfortable names, imagining having another
one in the class with whom I could get mixed up. I would be Dina G.
and she would be Dina B. and we would get each other’s homework
back and we would laugh about it, oh, how we would laugh.
In the world I now live in, there are talk show hosts called Dina,
housewives competing to be master chefs and the next big talent,
although we are getting a bit old for the latter. There are shop as-
sistants with my name on their badges. Dina has Facebook profiles,
Twitter handles. I feel like I’m in The Truman Show.
In the world I now live in, I savour the familiarity of English speakers
mispronouncing my name. It sates my appetite for belonging, like
fish and chips, vegemite, and pineapple lumps. Too much and I feel
nauseous, but just a little conjures nostalgic imaginings of a version
of me. In this world, I am meant, because we are both outsiders.
Their mispronunciation puts us both inside the world of my past,
just for a syllable.
A teacher once told us about semantic satiation. Words repeated
over and over become meaningless white noise invisible to our
ears. They sink into subliminality. He asked us if we knew the one
word that would never satiate us. Mine was the only hand up, and
he seemed a little surprised that I knew it was my name.
Fiction | Rachel Herz
100 101

Art | Katayoon Valamanesh Art | Katayoon Valamanesh

Pass Photo | 2018 Pass Photo | 2018

102 103

Art | Katayoon Valamanesh Art | Katayoon Valamanesh

Pass Photo | 2018 Pass Photo | 2018

104 Poetry

Nora Nadjarian

At Twenty
Minutes to Nine
The old vinyl record is scratching itself to death and the city so far away. She says
she was once in love and now it’s just walls. The world is something of a beauty,
something of a beast, and Miss H. wants to stop the game. The wedding dress may
have been frilly or pleated back then but her thighs aren’t there, her face has
crumbled. On the comb in her lap some white hairs, ivory threads. Every now and
then we are fools, she says, the sun hides and seeks. Memories are rotten déjà vu
and what-was, served on a polished tray. All night long the wedding cake is eaten by
darkness.

The Seagull
I forgot to tell you that there is betrayal in every play. It is make-believe but
the words twist in your heart. The family sits round a table, eats a seagull.
Mother: I don’t believe that birds have souls. Father: I love the uneven,
roasted skin. Brother: Remember how brutal its eyes were, when it
squawked? The dinner table is lacquered yellow with a touch of the bird’s
fury. They tear the seagull apart, as if blaming it for their hunger. Nina says a
pale-white prayer and asks: Have you learnt nothing from that last line?
Elizabeth Hill

CROQUET WITH GOD

the grass is cropped short like the back of a brown bear my relatives smack croquet balls

with hard mallets, knocking my thoughts about no one really takes notice of me

I am praying that I will disappear like Enoch the red ant vanishing into the ground

the tangerine and black butterfly which flew off from the top of my wicket

the fat and muscle around my bones I glorify the Lord by sacrificing food

the medical diagnosis offends me: OCD, autism, Catholicism last night the dinner was deep

brown velvet: beef bourguignon, scalloped potatoes, cake with cream delicacies offensive to

God, a menacing tide with wolfish undertow I ate vegetables and rice I rise above

the croquet, a cumulus, offering prayer to God I believe in God, the Father Almighty,

Creator of Heaven and Earth I have sinned I envy my cousin who makes all his shots

106 Poetry

this obligatory green game forced me to miss Mass this morning

My aunt shouts Jesus as she misses the wicket, her ball spinning across the field

I say a Hail Mary for her I praise God the robin redbreast under the nearby bush

the diamond day my sunlit parents I pray they will see their folly in denying God

They beg me to sleep in my crimson bed

the brown wooden floor welcomes me like a nail they beg me to eat meat, dairy and sugar

they weigh me every day like potatoes

I am not worried God will save me like Abraham’s son

I will not swirl in the toilet

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107
108
Ciara Maguire
OK !!!
i am bleeding in the national poetry library!
i am leaving rorschach tests on the leg
of my jeans! i wish i could ask you what
you see in me! i have spent all summer pressed
between the sun and a hard place! anything that happens
in nature must be okay! even if it is terrifying! all my lovers
tell me i am cold! it is true that there is a finesse
to it! to say only what is cruel enough to spark
desire and not enough to alter everything!
you could be something terrible and i would
never know! i am looking in the window of
a shop of mirrored furniture and there are small
slivers of us in everything! isn’t it interesting
how skin is the opposite of a mirror; it can only
show you yourself! i am drinking alone
and hoping it will reveal something!
i am waiting for you to text me back!
i pretend i am not waiting!
but really! i always am!
Poetry 109 Fiction
Cassidy Menard
There Is a Rose
You listen to Ben E. King’s Spanish Harlem for the third time in two
weeks. Strummed guitar rolls from the stereo and you want to rec-
ognize the sequence, but you don’t. In the past, you’ve confused
the beat of Hameln grass outside your window for the song’s ma-
racas, and if you’re not careful, the thrush thrush thrush will put
you to sleep. You remove the cushions from your wicker chair and
lurch the legs sideways to face the stereo. Window shut and spine
pressed to the seatback, you trace the song title across furrows in
your palm. You remember the song, the artist, the album, but not
why Samson left it to you.
Samson died three days after the stroke. You assumed it had taken
him right away, but no, said the son-in-law who sits next to you, he
held on for three days. “Can you imagine?” the son-in-law says, the
bald one with the nice teeth who sometimes appears in Christmas
cards. “Blind and mute. Gotta wonder if there’s a reason he held
on.”
You almost say me, but you know there’s no truth to it, the
comment more of an unpaid shot at Samson’s wife who sits three
rows ahead next to her daughters. With the funeral program be-
tween two fingers, you read the synopsis of his debut novel, the
one that caught all the monocled eyes and netted the most presti-
gious circle-jerk award, the one that “studied the writer’s struggle
for daily fulfilment while confined by the toil of artistic expression.”
You close the program, but Samson looks polished and dis-
honest in his photograph, so you hand it to the nursing home at-
tendant who’s already got your purse and cane, and say, “That’s
not him.” She pats your knee and you think to slap her, but they’ve
started the music and the first of his requested songs begins to
play. Ahead of you, the wife and daughters sit still, unaffected by
the violin and the congas, the pull of the Argentinian tango. You
can tell by their even breath that they do not see him in his green
housecoat at four in the morning, hands on his hips as he slides his
foot up your knee, counts uno dos tres cuatro and downs your glass
of orange juice like a shot of spiced rum.
Later, when you and the attendant wait to collect your items
from the coat check, the wife and daughters cross the reception
110
hall. “Mae,” says the wife. She holds a manila-wrapped package
with your name drawn in cursive on the front. The daughters flank
their mother. At least when they were little and wore their black hair
long and free you could pretend they weren’t his, just a pair of dolls
come to life. But now, with their hair cut and wound to suit their new
lives as mothers and businesswomen, it all slots together: the curl
nestled against the right temple, the low set cheekbones that blush
into the jaw, the long nose that peaks near the eyes like a ship’s
bow.
“Samson wanted you to have this,” says the wife, handing
you the package. She takes your hand and you have to admit that
hers are soft and would feel warm against a cheek or forehead,
that Samson would have liked how they pressed firm to his chest at
night. “Keep in touch,” she says.
The daughters place their hands on your arm so that the
four of you stand limb-locked until the attendant arrives with your
pea coat. The wife and daughters dissipate amongst the mourners
and you let the attendant draw the coat sleeves up your arms. She
offers you your purse and cane, but you hold the package to your
stomach and walk unbalanced towards the exit.
The café sits among thrift shops and family-owned convenience
stores, every gap in the street filled with either a pigeon or a brick
exterior. Inside, patrons cram in twos at umbrella-sized tables and
tap their feet to acoustic guitar. Shrouded in cigarette smoke, you
and Samson convene at a table in the back. Ceramic teacups sit
empty between you, drained over five minutes of what have you
been up to and read anything interesting and did the attorney mail
you the final divorce papers, until finally Samson reaches for your
hand. He doesn’t take it, just j-hooks your thumb with his index
finger.
“Mae,” he says, “Coy died last week.”
Before he even has the words out, you nod.
“In her sleep,” he continues when you don’t speak. “They
think she had cat leukemia.”
Samson withdraws his hand. He waits for an answer, but
there’s something different about his face that you can’t quite rec-
oncile. He has more freckles over his eyebrows like he’s spent time
in the sun, and his sideburns lick his chin. You finally settle on the
elastic band that ties his hair—it gives margins to his face, a hollow
to his cheeks.
Fiction | Cassidy Menard
111
“—belonged to us both.” Samson scrapes his thumbnail in-
side the teacup’s handle. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to say goodbye.”
You realize you haven’t spoken yet, so you say, “Poor Coy.”
A spoon drops a few tables over.
Samson runs a finger along his hairline and darts his eyes to
the far corner of the room before he says, “I got an editor to look at
my novel yesterday.”
“You did?” you say.
“She likes the material, but she’s going to tinker with the
plot.”
You tug at the bottom of your blouse and prop your elbows
on the table. “What’s wrong with the plot?”
“Messy. I think I lost the thread somewhere.”
“That’s great,” you say, and again someone drops a spoon.
You draw a breath. “Did you bury Coy?”
Samson scratches his lip. “We left her with the veterinari-
an.”
You lift your teacup and set it a few centimeters to the left.
“I should get going.” You stand. “Thanks for the tea,” you say and
hold your coat in both hands, even as you exit the café and cross
the street, though the December wind snaps like a belly flop.
You next see Samson on the inside flap of his book, which
he sends to you signed and with a note that reads, It’s finally here.
He writes another book, and it’s not as good as the first, but no one
cares because his name sticks. He gets engaged to someone in
the industry and the marriage follows five months later. When you
learn she’s pregnant (twins, can you believe it), you immediately
do the math, but it checks out—they could be his. They move to
Massachusetts for her job, return to Vancouver six years later be-
cause opportunity shifts, and sometime after, you no longer get life
updates, though he still sends you signed copies of his books and
an occasional Christmas card.
You know he knows just by the way he drops his coat on the floor
and shuts the screen door with two fists. You shovel Coy off her
pillow and set her in your lap where you sit cross-legged on the
sofa. That night, when you first got home from the daycare centre,
you figured he’d gone to the library or the wharf or the bus station
to write, but understood when he didn’t return by nine.
“His wife called here,” he says and enters the living room.
You can always tell when Samson has cried, and especially now
Fiction | Cassidy Menard
112
when he’s made no effort to hide it, his eyes wreathed in pink. You
draw Coy to your chest to still the heave in your throat. Samson
plods forward, but he doesn’t join you on the sofa and instead
climbs the staircase to the kitchen. He retrieves a spotted glass
from the dish rack and opens the fridge.
You follow. “Let me get you a cleaner one.”
Samson emerges with the orange juice pitcher and grips
the glass before you can take it away. “I want this one,” he says.
He pumps the plunger three times and tips the pitcher. Only a few
centimeters dribble from the spout.
“I’ll make another can,” you say.
Samson turns back to the fridge and seizes the milk carton.
He fills the blotched glass with the two percent and drinks it in one
go.
You hook your fingers under the counter’s lip and the tiles
spear your nail beds. “I made a mistake,” you say.
He doesn’t respond. You know about the itch in Samson
to avoid conflict, the pulley system of emotion. You step around
the counter, but Samson responds with a step back and knocks
the carton to the floor. Milk leaches along grout lines. You whip a
dish towel from the oven handle and hunker to chase the mess, but
Samson takes the towel. “Let me do it,” he says. Coy slinks up the
stairs and heads for the nearest tendril. Samson slides her back
with his foot. Milk seeps to your fingertips and into the toes of your
slippers while you stay crouched. “Just go,” he says and wipes your
toes.
“We can still have a baby.”
Samson looks at you from under his brow, his head tilted
down but his eyes upturned and you know you’ve gone too far, that
you’ve said exactly what you shouldn’t. You know then that you’ve
misinterpreted these past months, that his expression in the bath-
room sink translated to sleep deprivation, his sighs across the din-
ner table to problems with his novel.
He spends the night at his sister’s house while you sleep
on the sofa with Coy. You expect him to return the next morning,
but he stays for a week. When he finally comes home, he travels
the house with the same meticulous steps, his face set in the same
passive expression, and you nearly hurl a dish at his head or peel
the nail from your pinkie finger just to get him to look at you and
match your distress. But the pulley system holds.
Fiction | Cassidy Menard
113
You’ve made your pick of the fathers at the daycare centre—he’s
taller than Samson, his nose wide, but he has the same oblong face,
the same brown skin. He’s handsome. He’s a loan officer.
Samson spends his days perched on the chesterfield he
dragged to the back lawn. He cycles between notebook and legal
pad, pencil raised at his temple like a cat about to paw a goldfish
from the tank. When you get home from work, he enters through
the patio door, wraps his arms around your stomach and pulls you
to the sofa. “My characters lack motivation,” he says, or “What’s
the point? What’s the goal?” And you say, “To figure out what went
wrong.” But he sighs deeper and it’s clear that he’s lost his muse.
He pantomimes eating dinner, but you spot the performance every
time. At night, you lie in bed, but he won’t have sex, thwarts all at-
tempts with kisses on the cheek and a trench of blankets between
your bodies.
You begin to frequent the staff washroom before the par-
ents collect their children. Here you dab at the oil on your forehead.
You apply fresh gloss and run your fingers up your sides, probe for
loose threads to snip. When the loan officer arrives for his daughter,
you bend to help her with her backpack and sandals, watch his face
when he talks about his job, touch his elbow when you usher him
out the door. You get your coffee around the corner from his bank.
Midway through the third week, you cross paths at the till and set a
date.
When the time comes, you tell Samson you’re seeing a mov-
ie with coworkers and leave him to his chesterfield and legal pads.
You make it as far as the loan officer’s living room without issue.
He beckons from the sofa—a concave creature spattered in pink
peonies—with his dress shirt unbuttoned and collar flared to ac-
centuate the tuft below his neck. But you have to stop. None of it
feels like Samson.
“Can I see your car?” you say.
The loan officer sways to his feet. “My wife drove it to her
mother’s place for the weekend.” He crosses the room and sets the
stylus on a record in the corner. “Just relax,” he says. And you do
because the song sounds like something Samson would enjoy—
soulful and rhythmic with slurred violin.
“Turn down the lights,” you say and once the light recedes,
you know it will work if you imagine Samson. You remove your coat
and tell him to sit. You walk until your knees hit the sofa, lift a leg
and straddle his waist. He tries to kiss your neck and breasts, but
Samson always stays at the lips for a while, so you tip his head and
Fiction | Cassidy Menard
114
guide his mouth to yours. And when he pushes you to the cushions,
you wrap your legs tighter, cross your ankles and knead his back.
The whole time you keep your head tilted so that you don’t inhale
his hair or skin because it smells of menthol, not of Samson.
You and Samson herd the canoe with slow strokes until you’re far
enough from shore that you don’t have to crane your neck to see
sky. You’ve arrived too late for sunset, caught only the peaks when
you parked the car. But it’s better this way, more spontaneous. In-
stead of a sky flush with orange and pink, it floods mauve.
Samson strokes the dint at the back of your neck. He knocks
his foot against the bench and taps a tempo across his chest. You
pantomime a flute solo and he squeezes your shoulder. “Woah
there, Cecelia.”
“You’ve decided?” you say.
Samson nods. “Jude and Cecelia. Hero and heroine.” He
swings his head to you. “Naive children who require much guid-
ance.”
You don’t like that he’s said that word children again, but
he presses on about recent changes in his story and you think he
might not have realized. Across the lake, a loon leads her flock to
shore. You slip an arm over the hull and paddle the water to speed
their passage, though their white bellies are too distant and they
probably don’t notice the assistance.
Samson stares in your direction.
“What?” you say, and the severity surprises you.
He places his hands over your ears, pulls you to his lap, and
holds it still—body, boat and lake—while he kisses your mouth, and
you begin to wonder about the bounds of his forgiveness, at how
far it would stretch.
Work at the daycare suits you. Samson thinks it’s because of your
maternal drive, but it has more to do with the repetitive tasks and
structured days. Building blocks go in the yellow bins and musical
instruments hang on their pegs. Problems have solutions. Hungry
children eat apple slices, bored children watch puppet shows, rest-
less children play on the swings, and sleepy children nap. You can
see the whole operation behind shut eyes and take action before
something becomes a problem. And you do it well. Where Samson
thrives in the disarray of creativity, you were raised to see fore-
Fiction | Cassidy Menard
115
thought and organization as your talents.
Two months have passed, and you know you have to tell him
soon. But whenever you get home from work, he overwhelms you
with his fuss of conversation. He holds a vigil in the dining room,
bowed over his manuscript, and exclaims to you at the other end
of the house, “The ideas just flow today.” But they also flow the
next day, and the day after that. Finally, you decide to tell him when
you cross paths in the washroom before bed. He brushes his teeth,
his mouth frothed at the corners, and you prepare to wash your
face, hands already lathered. He’s said that he plans to add more
to a paragraph before he goes to sleep, so you rest your upturned
palms in the sink, and say, “There’s no baby.”
Samson’s toothbrush slumps to one side and he speaks
through the foam. “What?”
“I’m not having a baby,” you say, let him add anymore to the
end of the statement if he chooses. You take your hands from the
sink and cross them over your chest, notch your fingers to your
night wrap.
He removes the brush from his mouth, spits. Spearmint
skips off his tongue. “Did this just happen?”
You nod.
Samson blows hair off his bottom lip and wraps you in his
arms. For several minutes you stand and listen to the toilet bowl
fill and the faucet leak, bury your face in the troughs of his green
housecoat. You wonder if he’s trying to assign guilt. He ushers you
to the bedroom, settles you on pillows and sets Coy at your feet.
But once bundled, sweat fixes to the back of your neck and legs like
sap. You pull off the covers and walk away.
Samson speeds after you. “Mae,” he says.
“I need cold.” You walk down the hall, push open the patio
door and wade into the wet black grass, to the edge of the light that
spills from the living room. Step a little further. Lie down.
You and Samson marry at city hall without spectacle. Once you se-
cure the marriage licence, you rent a teal Ambassador and take to
the coast, survive a day on seltzer water, shelled pistachios, and
mint Chiclets. You rent a room at a motel halfway to your destina-
tion, but lounge the next morning on the tasseled ottomans, devote
three hours to a crossword puzzle and decide to spend the week-
end there instead. Leopard frogs shadow your steps to and from
the ice machine. The Bee Gees blare from the room next door until
Fiction | Cassidy Menard
116
the manager tells them to pipe down. You have sex once you assure
Samson that it’s safe, but not on the bed because you can’t relax
when pinned by the damp comforters that smell of hair product and
fish. Instead, you and Samson drive half a mile up the highway, park
at a rest area, and do it in the passenger side.
Afterwards, you sit with your backs to the dashboard and
your feet straddling the reclined headrests. You pass Samson the
thermos of strawberry Nestlé Quik and count another set of head-
lights. Flamenco guitar reels from the radio to the strokes of a güiro.
Samson wipes his lip with his knuckles. “I think I might take some
time off work,” he says.
You can’t see his face without the help of a passing car.
“I like my job,” he says. “But I won’t have time to write with a
newborn.”
Two sets of headlights pass in quick succession.
“You’d be home with me, then?” you say.
“I thought you found something.”
“An interview. At the daycare.”
Samson tips his head to your shoulder. “Listen,” he says. “I
know you’re anxious, but I think I have enough saved to make this
work. I just need to give this book a good, true shot.”
You begin to nod before he’s even finished his appeal.
“Really?”
“I’m your wife,” you say and take his hand.
To celebrate new plot developments, Samson returns one day with
an almond-eyed kitten. He plops the black smudge in your lap and
launches into talk about the novel.
“I’ve decided it will end with the male lead’s capture and the
female lead’s deception.”
You play with the ruff along the kitten’s neck. “That sounds
fitting,” you say.
Samson rotates the dining chair and leans forward. He
reaches a finger and taps the kitten on the head. “She can be our
experiment,” he says.
“What?”
“Like the first chapters of a novel,” he says. “When you hav-
en’t decided on a tone or figured out how the characters will inter-
act. Test chapters.”
“You don’t know how we’ll interact?”
“No, I just mean this will keep us occupied until I can get the
Fiction | Cassidy Menard
117
rings.”
“I don’t need a ring.”
He scoots closer and tries to scratch the kitten behind the
ear, but it squirms in your lap and chuffs. “Maybe she agrees,” he
says.
Samson works night shifts the next two weeks. During the
days, you clean cupboards and line them with wax paper or you
read the novel Samson recommended about Moscow and the devil.
You see Samson for a few hours when he wakes before work, but
once he’s gone, you sit on the sofa and search the newspapers for
job advertisements. The kitten rests next to you and ploughs her
head and paws into the pillows. You coax her to your lap, but she
wriggles free and lies where cushion meets armrest. Before you go
to bed, you circle three prospects and place the newspaper on the
counter for Samson when he gets home.
You find the kitten dead in its cage the next morning. It
looks smaller and blacker than it had the day before. You go to
the bathroom, come back with a towel, and swaddle the body. You
place the bundle between flowerpots in the backyard.
Samson should wake in four or five hours, so you drive to
the shelter and select another black cat with similar almond eyes.
This one doesn’t have the same fur collar, but Samson hadn’t spent
much time with the kitten. Once home, the new kitten regards her
surroundings with greater reverence then the last, plays the field
with greater tact. When Samson wakes, he runs a finger down the
kitten’s belly and says, “She’s a lot calmer today. We should really
name her.”
That night, you bury the first cat in the backyard between
potentilla shrubs and water the lawn so that the broken soil doesn’t
stand out.
Your father dies on the Tuesday before your six-month anniversary
with Samson. It feels wrong to attend the funeral together since
your father only met him once, so you get a ride with your uncles to
the cemetery, sit next to your aunts for the service, and meet Sam-
son that afternoon at the wake where you can only clock an hour
before the nausea hits.
You tug on Samson’s arm and say, “I’m leaving.” He nods
and you lead him by the elbow through the crowd, without a good-
bye, without a coat. The skinny hallways of your uncle’s apartment
building flaunt taupe carpet and lemon sconces. You walk, make
Fiction | Cassidy Menard
118 119

turns at random, trace your hand along the wall so that it swipes
across the peepholes when you pass. Samson follows three door
lengths behind, sweet Samson with his swooped hair and blue tie.
He doesn’t talk, but when you glance back, he quirks one corner of
his mouth.
Your hand slips from the wallpaper. Samson guides you
down. You heave tears like you need to be sick, wish that you could
vomit up grief like the stomach flu. Be done with it. Samson holds
your knees and lets you cry. Warmth spreads at his touch and you
realize that he’s the only person with this skill. You take his hand
and the warmth latches to your fingers too. You cannot conceptu-
alize the cold you would become if someday he decided not to hold
your hand.
“What can I do?” says Samson.
Without much deliberation, you say, “I’m pregnant.”
You could be. You haven’t checked. And no, you’re not a
fool, but you hope he doesn’t repeat the words because you know
you’ll deny them.
But he just holds your knees tighter, and you slot your fin-
gers over his knuckles.
Finally, he says, “We’ll make this work, Mae.”
His name is Samson. He’s a writer.
He takes you to this Irish pub two blocks from the record
store and you sit knee to knee at the bar. You both order grass-
hoppers and while you wait, he tells you of his plans to write an
adventure novel, an odyssey of passion and liberty. You’re pretty
sure you love him. He does everything opposite of you, which is to
say, not modelled or self-conscious. His speech doesn’t follow one
single thread and you could never imagine him with a newspaper
like yours—highlighted by subject and folded at the margins. No
watch on the wrist. No wireframe glasses to structure his face. No
collar on his jacket. Cheeks wind-chilled.
you enter, the man at the till peers from behind the counter, waves
with two fingers and returns to his clipboard. You recognize Ja-
nis Joplin’s voice from the speakers. Other customers dog paddle
through the horizontal stacks and pause on occasion to read a title.
You scan the alphabetized rows until you find the letter “K” and
begin your search. A few minutes later, a man approaches from the
“G” section.
He’s not tall, but he’s taller than you, his black hair parted at
the center and tucked behind his ears. He’s not smiling, but you can
tell that he’s happy by the way his cheeks weave to a point and his
eyebrows curve instead of arch.
“Are you a fan of Ben E. King?” he says.
You look down at the album that’s balanced between your
fingers: a rose sprouts from cracked pavement, the image framed
in pink.
“Yes,” you say, but only because you don’t want him to re-
treat.
“That’s one of my favourite albums.” He pats the record with
his pinkie finger.
“Mine too.”
“Is it really,” he says, though his tone doesn’t probe for more,
so you give him all your teeth, and with every additional question,
you fit yourself into his life.

Your last stop: the record store with the pelican logo, the one
across the street from the coin wash. You’ve already purchased
the sheepskin slippers and white Bacardi for your father’s birthday,
which leaves only Nat King Cole’s After Midnight record.
Wooden racks converge at the center of the store. The re-
cords themselves look like garter stitches in a coiled scarf. When

Fiction | Cassidy Menard Fiction | Cassidy Menard

120 Poetry 121

Patrycja Humienik

DIG A CAVE
INTO THE
FUTURE
Hips against the counter. Lovers know
the mouth is full of sex & silt.

Breath warms the kitchen but frost clings to the windows.

A woman sculpted in my mind. Her melting collarbone.

I ask for icicles. As in, suspension—no, conservation.

My longing a museum

I kneel into. Sleet sounds like susurration when I’m dreaming

of the sea. Salt & swoon cupped close, every prayer

anchialine. No delirium like being

so thirsty.

A single narwhal joins a pod of belugas

1000km out of range. Some caves

are all bones & hunt,

some caves are imagined.

Art | Elaine Chao

Beast of Burden | 2022

122 123

Art | Elaine Chao Art | Elaine Chao

Beast of Burden | 2022 Beast of Burden | 2022

124 Poetry 125 Poetry

Gamze S. Saymaz James Croal Jackson

Alive
Show a baby grass
for the first time

yes

there will be more of that

APRÈS-SOLEIL I
Down at the mantı place,
near the beach, two gold
rimmed plates of garlic
yoğurt marbled with
tomato olive oil, red
pepper flakes, and dried
mint hiding a constellation
of hot dough, are set on
the blue, plaid tablecloth
that almost matches your
shirt, as chrysanthemums
reach out of the stained
glass vase at the centre
to cover half of your face.

APRÈS-SOLEIL II
Bikini briefs hanging from the bathtub faucet like some tired fruit dripping nectar.
126 Fiction 127 Fiction

Phương Anh

Flowerie War
It is
a peaceful war,
a battle without death.
From dawn till dusk, we stare at the sky.
It’s a blue-brick wall and it blinds me.
It’s a blue-brick wall and it makes me forget.

It’s that kind of day.

Ekphrastic flash fiction inspired by the artworks of Vietnamese
painter Trần Trọng Vũ
A soldier in green is listening to the quiet field. No birds are singing,
no wind is blowing. Only silence answers their hopes. A few miles
away, is the village: two steps away from safety. Crouching down,
they wish under their breath…

They say that it is enough for one bird to die.

The tall grass stood still, the horizon lay stagnant. Drops of sweat
trickle down their pale forehead.

They say it would be enough for a cry to sound.

But when they draw their guns, and point at the enemy, pull the
trigger, only white lilies shoot out. [ ] wipes out the field,
laying a path for souls, not to go, but to come back.

From the footprint of the soldier in green, chrysanthemums will

bloom. Porcelain heads will grow and grow, and grow and
grow from the inflorescence, their petals stretching outward,
thirty-two folds, a thousand folds. A thousand hands lending a
help to those forgotten, to those who have lost their way.

Come back, come back, it says.

The green soldier stops. Looks back,

One at a time, they retrace their steps, walking on memory’s dusty

skin. But with each step, their footprint gets smothered, the hole
dug deeper. And, chrysanthemums will grow.
128 129

The North Wind comes by and is dancing around the green soldier. The Artwork that Inspired
Petals drift away from the flowers, carried by the wind, to a place

Flowerie War
far away. Then, all that is left is another field of verdant grass.
Sweat trickles down the soldier’s cheek.

The blooming sky has now reached its peak. It’s ready, it’s ripe.
Then clouds begin to fall, like spoiled apples dropping from the
branch–and along with them, the battle ceases. The brick-blue wall
fades and is replaced by a black one. Tonight would be a night
without light. Trần Trọng Vũ’s collection
“Painting Like Writing is A Violation” (2015)
Amongst the field of empty stars, all alone, is the soldier in green. http://vietnam-artist.blogspot.com/2017/06/paintings-like-writing-is-violation-of.html
The opponent, if there’s any, has retreated for the day. Or so it
seems.
Trần Trọng Vũ’s “The Illusion of War” installment (2009)
They know, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byb8k12R4-A
It is the soldier’s duty to stay guard, be vigilant.
They understand.
The cicada’s song lulls the night.
They know that there is no turning back.
In the distance, a firefly lights up.
They understand that this is only the beginning.
Two steps away, a fire set ablaze.
They know, they understand, that they should have done something.
Then, the sun rose.
They know.
The cannon sounds.
They understand.
Chrysanthemum blossoms.
The sound of a newborn’s cry.

Fiction | Phương Anh

130 131

Art | Cau Silva Art | Cau Silva

Withdraw 5 | 2019 Withdraw 7 | 2019

132

Art | Cau Silva

Withdraw 20 | 2019
Abdulkareem Abdulkareem

Prelude to survival
or how I learned the
language of phobia
after Ernest Ogunyemi

I sat like a good son & listened as a cascade of burning white doves poured from the ridge of my
mother’s mouth. I learned how a man pursued owning the menorah of his own Hanukkah, how
he sought owning the marigold of his garden. & he was halfway into obtaining both, but he never
did. So many things can drag a home into the mouth of ruin, & dreams smooth as a porcelain &
rhinestones run into shatter. My mother tells me there is promise for goodness nestled on my
palms & most times I wonder what could be the prelude to my redemption. I’ve shivered about
things & the most that carries the eye of a vulture out of all is for my father’s life to be a
premonition for mine. How can I evade this eclipse? When I recede into these memories, it’s just
a reservoir brimming with failures or we shouldn’t call it failure, we should call it goodness
134 Poetry

choked in the throat of its threshold. & tomorrow might come with a soft rainfall, I mean the type
that washes the body like a redemption from sin. But what if my body is drenched with the
powdered coal, will this downpour wash the blackness & make my dreams glimmer like an
inferno eating down a hut? Insert the noon sun in a rain cloud & see if the rainstorm will
continue. I wield a phobia on my tongue, that the sun would inflict its sultriness & my ice won’t
thaw & my plants won’t convert the light. I have no hymn to name this ache, I don’t want to be a
sky empty of a contrail. Bless you boy, may your daffodils dance & flutter to the breeze blowing
on a soft day, may you decode every teleprompt with your voice, may your life be fresh &
fruitful.

Poetry | Abdulkareem Abdulkareem

135
136 Creative Nonfiction 137 Creative Nonfiction

References and Notes for "Points of Memory" on p. 30 (in order https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2012.59.2.207.

of appearance)
1
Toni Morrison quote on “rememory” from her article “'I wanted to
carve out a world both culture specific and race-free': an essay by
Toni Morrison.” The Guardian, August 8, 2019.
www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/08/toni-morrison-remem-
ory-essay.
2
Swahili song lyrics from “Malaika” by Adam Salim, 1945.
9
Obituary for Zipora Heller in the Berliner Morgenpost. Berlin,
Germany, 30 Sept. 2001.
10
Dr. Susan Moore’s Facebook livestream on medical treatment.
"Dr. Susan Moore Last Words Before Dying From COVID and
Neglect” by Dr. Susan Moore, posted by Dr. Linda Burke. Decem-
ber 22, 2020. YouTube video, 7:27. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=XpLBhAcTpTw.

3
Images from Farbe bekennen: afro-deutsche Frauen auf den 11
Mirrianne Mahn’s Instagram video on medical treatment.
Spuren ihrer Geschichte ed. May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, and Mirrianne Mahn [@mirrianne_m], video and response letter,
Dagmar Schultz. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997. Instagram, May 15, 2022, www.instagram.com/p/CdkekaPD-
qKS/?hl=en.
4
Images from Steve Gardner, "Serena Williams Describes
Near-Death Experience She Had after Giving Birth to Daughter
Olympia,” USA TODAY, April 7, 2022, ams-near-death- child-
birth-complications/9504616002/.

5
Two film stills (including subtitles of letters from Akerman’s
mother) from the documentary News From Home directed
by Chantal Akerman. Independent documentary, France, 1977.

6
Film still from the documentary Hoffnung im Herz showing
an image of May Ayim typing on her computer. The subtitle,
translated from German to English, reads "For me, writing means
communicating a message that is understood." Hoffnung im Herz
directed by Maria Binder. Documentary short, Germany, 1997.

7
Text of point number 32 under "Manifestations of Racial Discri-
mination" in a UN report on racism, racial discrimination, and xeno-
phobia in Germany. United Nations. Working Group of Experts on
People of African Descent. Human Rights Council. “A/HRC/36/60/
Add.2: Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of Afri-
can Descent on its mission to Germany - Note by the Secretariat.”
Country Report. August 15, 2017. Delivered to the Human Rights
Council at its 36th session, September 11-29, 2017.

8
Images of text from Roth, Louise Marie and Henley, Megan M.
“Unequal Motherhood: Racial-Ethnic and Socioeconomic Dispari-
ties in Cesarean Sections in the United States” in Social Problems,
Volume 59, Issue 2 (2012): 207–227.

References and Notes References and Notes

138
Abdulkareem Abdulkareem (Frontier III) is a Nigerian writer and
linguist. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY,
West Trade Review, Off Topic Publishing, Orion’s Belt, Aster Lit, Fe-
ral Poetry, Better Than Starbucks, The Shore Poetry, Brittle Paper,
Claw and Blossom & elsewhere. He reads poetry for Frontier Poetry
& Agbowó Magazine.
Sarpong Osei Asamoah is a bilingual Ghanaian poet who lives in
Accra, Ghana. His work has featured in Tampered Press Magazine,
Protean, Agbowo Magazine, Lolwe, Olongo Africa Magazine, Baco-
pa Literary Review, (Twi poems) at WriteGhana.com, 20.35: Antho-
logy of Contemporary Poetry and elsewhere. He has also been an
intern at the Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD)
and is an editorial intern at Tampered Press.
Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi (Frontier XVIII) studies law at the Univer-
sity of Ibadan, Nigeria. He's an editor at The Nigeria Review, and
his work is featured or forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Nigerian News
Direct, 20.35 Africa, Trampset, Rough Cut Press, and elsewhere.
He's a 2021 ARTmosterrific writer-in-residence, has been honored
by the PROFWIC Poetry Contest, and is a BKPW Poetry Contest
second runner-up.
Constance Bacchus was born in central Washington state and
has continued to be drawn to the area. Her writing often includes
aspects of the Pacific Northwest that she feels a particularly strong
connection to, such as the wildlife, native plants, and the weather.
Her latest little chapbook sound like you was hand-sewn and de-
signed by Red Mare Press, 2022. Sometimes she works at the li-
brary.
Sonia Boué is a multiform artist, a writer, and a consul-
tant for neurodiversity in the arts. She has a significant
archive of postmemory work and her current focus is
neurodivergent practice-led research. Boué has been
awarded multiple Arts Council England project grants;
her work has been exhibited internationally, and is
held in digital form at Tate Britain, the BBC, and Bodle-
ian Library. She has performed in the UK, Ireland, and
Spain. Her collage works have been acquired by the
Kanyer Art Collection. She was recently nominated for
Contributors
the OutSet Research Trip to Documenta 15
for disabled artists and curators, and was
the recipient of a commission for We Are
Invisible We Are Visible (2021 Amper-
sand Prize) presented by DASH, the dis-
abled-led visual arts organisation.
Guide Aguilera Castro was born in
Santiago de Chile and is currently based
in Cologne. He has a fine arts degree
from the Universidad de Chile and worked
as a teaching assistant for photography and
video courses in universities all over Santia-
go. Themes such as our relation to and between
memory and landscape, migration, mental health,
as well as the problematics of the photographic cross
his work. His artwork has been shown in exhibitions
in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santiago,
Fine Arts Museum of Santiago, and Ekho gallery.
Elaine B. Chao is a traditional-digital hybrid
artist working in Queens, NY. She earned her
BA in Art from Rutgers University, NJ in 2013.
Digital printmaking forms the foundation of her
practice. Expanding on traditional techniques,
she first composes paintings on canvas or paper
using acrylic, oil, and flashe. She then imports the
paintings into image manipulation programs to blend,
apply filters, and run actions. The final digital work is then
printed or uploaded to an AR app for display. Ancient Chinese art,
the work of Gerhard Richter, Paul Klee, and the films of Wong Kar
Wai inform her work. She currently exhibits with Solas Studio and
Pictor Gallery in New York, NY.
Veronika Cherednychenko was born in 1994 in Kherson, Ukraine.
Works with classic and new media, participated in numerous exhi-
bitions and projects. Currently lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine. A
month before the beginning of the war in Ukraine, conversations
in close family circles were reduced to discussing the likelihood of
war. The tension grew, and Veronika began a series of works on
this state of expectation. Veronika started the "Expectations" se-
Contributors
 ries in the first week of the war, when the
only thing left to expect was tomorrow. No
plans, no hopes. And the title of the series
has changed. Unfortunately, the war is still
going on, and the “First Week” series, too.
Dr. Patricia Falkenburg is a molecular biol-
ogist, a poet writing in German and English, and
a visual artist. Born in Mannheim, she currently
lives in Pulheim near Cologne. Patricia’s poems have
been published in numerous anthologies, journals, and blogs.
Portugiesische Notizen [Portuguese notes] was published in 2019 as
LyrikHeft 24 with Sonnenberg-Presse, Chemnitz. Find her online at
www.patricia-falkenburg.com.
Barbara Genova is the pen name of an actress/writer who got
stranded in central Europe during the first COVID lockdown of
many. She's the author of Dirt City, a monthly column host-
ed by literary journal Bureau of Complaint. Poetry and
stories written as Barbara have been featured on
Hobart, Strange Horizons, Expat Press, Misery
Tourism, FERAL, 433, Last Estate, The Daily
Drunk, Anti-Heroin Chic, Sledgehammer
Lit, Scissors and Spackle, surfaces.cx,
The Final Girl Bulletin Board, Fahmidan
Journal, The Hallowzine (2021), The Bear
Creek Gazette, A Thin Slice of Anxiety,
Roi Fainéant Press, Discretionary Love,
Poetry Super Highway, Gutslut Press,
the New International Voices Series at
IceFloe Press, and the Hecate Magazine
anthology issue #2 (DECAY, winter 2021).
More to come on Witch Craft Mag and The
Airgonaut. She can be found on Twitter @
CallGenova (almost never) and on Instagram
@thebarbaragenova.
Katarina Gotic is a Bosnian-born poet and neuro-
scientist. Recently, she completed her first book of poetry,
we need a breathing tongue between, and is currently working on
several projects that combine poetry and visual arts. She lives in
Berlin.
Contributors
João Luís Barreto Guimarães is a poet and recon-
structive surgeon from Porto, Portugal, where he
also teaches poetry to medical students at Univer-
sity of Porto. João is the author of eleven poetry
books and recipient of the António Ramos Rosa
National Poetry Award (2017), a Bertrand Poetry
Book of the Year distinction (2018), the Armando
da Silva Carvalho Literary Prize (2018), the Willow
Run Poetry Award (2020), and the DST Grand Prize in
Literature (2022). His individual works have appeared in
journals spanning over twenty countries, including Asymptote,
The London Magazine, Poetry London, and Words Without Borders.
Abbie Hart is an 18-year-old poet from Houston, Texas. She has
been published 19 times, including in BRIDGE and Millenial
Pulp, she is the Editor in Chief of the Literary Forest Po-
etry Magazine, and she was previously a semifinalist
for the Houston Youth Poet Laureate. In her spare
time, she makes zines for cool people and learns
new useless skills incessantly (current favorite:
crochet granny squares). Find her online at ab-
biemhart.wordpress.com.
Esther Heller (they/she) is a Kenyan-German
poet, writer, and experimental filmmaker. They
are a Barbican Young Poet 18/19, Obsidian Foun-
dation fellow, and Ledbury Critic. She co-hosts a
monthly radio show called Poetic Healing with Zen &
Kondo on THF Radio Berlin and is currently doing an MFA
in Poetry at Cornell University.
Brian Henry is the author of eleven books of poetry, most re-
cently Permanent State, and the new prose book Things Are Com-
pletely Simple: Poetry and Translation. He has translated
Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices, Aleš Debeljak’s
Smugglers, and five books by Aleš Šteger. His work
has received numerous honors, including two NEA
fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a
Howard Foundation fellowship, a Slovenian Acad-
emy of Arts and Sciences grant, and the Best
Translated Book Award.
142
Rachel Herz is a writer who has now lived in Berlin, Germany,
longer than Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she grew up. She is a
queer with a day job.
Elizabeth Hill’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in
34th Parallel Magazine, Blue Lake Review, Last Stanza Poetry Jour-
nal, and I-70 Review, among other journals. She is a retired Admin-
istrative Law Judge who decided suits between learning disabled
children and their school systems. She lives in Harlem, NYC, with
her husband and two irascible cats.
Ditta Baron Hoeber is an artist as well as a poet. Her poems have
been published in a number of magazines including The American
Journal of Poetry, Juxtaprose, Pank, Burningword Literary Review,
the American Poetry Review, and The Midnight Oil. Her first book,
Without You: A Poem And A Preface is forthcoming in 2022.
Patrycja Humienik is a queer Polish-American writer and editor
based in Seattle, WA. Her poems, featured in Ninth Letter, TriQuar-
terly, Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, The Slowdown podcast, and
elsewhere, have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New
Poets, and Best of the Net anthologies. She is working on her first
book, Anchor Baby. Find Patrycja on Twitter @jej_sen.
James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in
film production. He has three chapbooks: Count Seeds With Me
(Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022), Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books,
2021), and The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights, 2017). He
edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, PA.
Rina Kenovic is a poet and translator based in Paris, France.
Her work has appeared in digital and print journals such as
La vie manifeste, Point de Chute, Censored Magazine, Li-
chen, as well as in collective fanzines and video-poetry
projects such as Alien She x Poetry.
Ajay Kumar lives in Chennai, India. His work has
appeared in The Masters Review, Rattle, The Bombay
Review, and Usawa, among other publications.
Ciara Maguire is a writer living in Glasgow. Her work
Contributors
143
has previously been published in Gutter Magazine, SPAM Zine,
From Glasgow to Saturn & more. She is also the editor of
Queer Futures Zine. Her work is interested in lesbian
commonalities, the internet, and queer optimism.
Devon Mello studied writing at Bard College, and
currently works in Providence, Rhode Island, as a
teacher. His work has previously been featured in
HASH and Newport Daily News.
Cassidy Menard was born and raised in Yellowknife,
Northwest Territories, Canada. She graduated from the
University of Victoria with a bachelor’s degree in writing and
served as a fiction intern on the editorial board of The Malahat Re-
view. She is currently in law school. Her work has appeared in Grain
and The Fiddlehead.
Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer based in Cy-
prus. She has been published internationally.
Phương Anh is a Vietnamese emerging
translator, writer, and editor at youth- and BI-
POC-run magazine GENCONTROLZ. Their
work has been featured on Asymptote, Inter-
pret, Agapanthus, Yuzu Press, and is forthcom-
ing in PR&TA. They are currently pursuing a BA
in Language and Culture at University College
London.
Calvin Olsen is an American writer and translator based
in Edinburgh, Scotland. He holds an MFA from Boston University
and is currently a PhD candidate in communication, rhetoric, and
digital media at NC State University. His work has most recently ap-
peared in The Adroit Journal, Carve, Couplet Poetry, Poetry Scot-
land, and World Literature Today, and his translation of Portuguese
poet João Luís Barreto Guimarães’s Mediterranean won the 2020
Willow Run Poetry Award and is forthcoming from Hidden River
Arts. More work can be found at calvin-olsen.com.
Julia Ongking currently lives in her beautiful home country of the
Philippines. Born and raised as a Chinese-Filipino, she enjoys de-
Contributors

veloping her perspectives through reading,
writing, and having meaningful conversations
with people from all walks of life. Her work has
appeared in various digital and print publications,
and has been recognized by the Scholastic Arts and
Writing Awards.
Allis Sääsk is a Berlin-based, 21-year-old poet and journalist
from Stockholm, Sweden. She is currently studying towards a de-
gree in comparative literature and contributes a bimonthly column
to the Swedish online magazine KULT.
Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) published more than 50 books of
poetry in his native Slovenian. Translated into over 25 languages,
his poetry received numerous awards, including the Jenko Prize,
the Prešeren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, and the Mladost
Prize. In the 1990s, he served for several years as the Cultural At-
taché for the Slovenian Embassy in New York, and he later held
visiting professorships at various universities in the U.S.
Gamze S. Saymaz is a Berlin-based poet and video artist orig-
inally from Istanbul. She was awarded a BA in psychology and in
English literature from Yeditepe Universitesi. She is now pursuing
an MA at Freie Universitat Berlin with a focus on film. Her work has
been published in Bosphorus Review of Books, FU Review, and Tint
Journal. Her shorts have been shown at Studio H, Komsu Kafe Col-
lective, KargART, and most recently online in collaboration with the
performance art platform Body in Perform. Gamze is currently an
editor for FU Review Berlin, makes personal documentaries on vul-
nerability, and watches horror movies.
Lauren Schenkman’s journalism, fiction, and translations
have been published by The New York Times Magazine,
Atlas Obscura, Tin House, TED Ideas, Granta, The Hudson Review,
Writer’s Digest, Electric Literature, decomp, the University of Mel-
bourne Press, and The Kenyon Review, among other places. She
has co-produced radio stories for Afropop Worldwide and Public
Radio International's The World, and her fiction has been performed
on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was a reporter and editor at Science
magazine and a Fulbright grant recipient in Nicaragua, her mother’s
homeland.
Contributors
145
Sana Hajra Siddiqi is a writer and MA student of English at Freie
Universitat, originally from Lahore, Pakistan. She is currently based
in Berlin.
Cau Silva was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and now lives and works
in Berlin. She has a bachelor's in social sciences from São Paulo
State University (UNESP) and a postgraduate degree in visual arts,
multimedia, and education from the University of Campinas (UNI-
CAMP). Cau has exhibited at art fairs, university institutes, publish-
ing fairs, and cultural and independent spaces. She collaborated
in performances and took part in residencies which helped to in-
crease and enhance her research. She is currently doing
an MA in spatial strategies at Berlin Kunsthochschule
Weissensee.
Dominika Šimková is an artist from Slova-
kia who is currently based in Berlin. She is
interested in what is fragile and hidden un-
der layers of prescribed meaning, which
is why she works with mediums such as
embroidery, where the time needed to
produce the work transforms into a form
of frozen memory. The project "Days
Too Long" involved such a process: The
drinking of (a lot of) tea, waiting for the
tea stains to dry, and embroidering over
those tea stains. The finished works em-
body the story of almost unbearable repe-
tition and separation. At its core, her work is
about what it means to wait patiently until you
can understand the language the world around you
speaks.
Kyra Simone is a Tunisian-American writer originally from Los
Angeles and now based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Conjunctions,
The Denver Quarterly, and Best American Experimental Writing,
among other journals. She is a member of the publishing collective
Ugly Duckling Presse and part of a two-woman team running the
editorial offices at Zone Books. Her flash fiction collection, Palace
Contributors
146 147

of Rubble, is forthcoming from Tenement make the familiar visible in a new way. Her visual works have been
Press. shown in international indie magazines food&, snail eye cosmic
comic convention publications, Matratze Magazine, Concrete Na-
Arushee Suri received an MFA ture, on stages in the form of costume design at Schauspiel Leipzig,
from Central Saint Martins, Univer- Cammerspiele Leipzig, Theaterhaus Jena, and at exhibitions. Zeise
sity of Arts London, and a BFA from is currently working on a poetry collection on themes concerning
College of Art, New Delhi, India. the relationship between nature and the human body through the
She is an artist and educator who lens of cycles and everlasting change.
has taught printmaking to under-
privileged adults in New Delhi and Roya Zendebudie is an MA student of English
young adults with learning disabilities Studies: Literature, Language, Culture at Freie
in London. She mentored residencies Universität Berlin. Her previous work has been
for the Printmaking Foundation of India published in Tint Journal.
in the year 2018 and 2019. Her interactive
installations, paintings, drawings, embroider-
ies, and sculptures have been presented in cura-
ted, group gallery, and museum exhibitions in the UK, India, Singapore,
Italy, the US, and Greece. Arushee has permanent collections at the
State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki: Greece, Gallery
Rosenfeld: London, Printmaking Foundation of India: India, Brooklyn
Art Library: the USA, and Private Collectors in London and New Del-
hi.

Katayoon Valamanesh is an Iranian artist currently residing in

the Netherlands. Katayoon’s multidisciplinary work is inspired by
immigrant life and reflects on the melancholy behind the decision
to leave one’s own home. Katayoon’s art was awarded second prize
at the 2018 Jokal Painting Festival in Tehran and has appeared in
group exhibitions in Iran, the Netherlands, and Austria.

Lemmy Ya’akova is an advocate for y2k low culture, a film pho-

tographer, a popcorn enthusiast and a cat parent to their overgrown
son, Moose. Their work can be found in HAD (Hobart After Dark),
Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Hooligan Magazine, and other publica-
tions. Keep up with their jokes on Twitter @lem_jamin and their life
on Instagram @ashkenazi_yew.

Mirjam Zeise lives and works in Leipzig, Germany, and is a

multi-disciplinary artist with a degree in theater studies. Her visual
and literary works often use a spark of comedy with a dash of fic-
tion, fairytale, the surreal, or a twist to question, complement, and

Contributors Contributors
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Lost + Found
SAND 25 is a search for the lost and found—from losing
and finding personal histories and identities, to reflecting
on what is lost and found with the passing of time, and
finding wonder in the infinite expanse of the universe,
which can mirror our own most intimate experiences in
uncanny ways.

Based in Berlin, SAND is a nonprofit literary and art

journal published twice a year by a team from the city’s
international community. Featuring work by writers,
translators, and artists from around the world, SAND
seeks out fresh and underrepresented perspectives.

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