From the Collected Poems of Kermit the Frog

Once there were stars,
strings to dangle them,
an unseen hand disappearing
into the moon’s waxing
ass. It’s all hanged,
you see. My tongue
no longer flicks to the quick
of your hearts. You,
who once flocked weekly
to my swamp, come
no more. I rage
to no one,
not even dear Piggy,
who karate chopped me
so often
with her love.
Oh, these piggy thoughts.
I never laid
my stuffing bare to her. So many
canceled seasons ago,
we lay watching birds
out a window—not
the Sam and Betsy sort,
but ones with
bona fides.
I’m talking plover, cardinal,
and wren—sky-glazed
and singing, but Big Apple
bustle gobbled
them up. I almost
told her I wanted
to spring
into water, plunge to find
bottom, maybe a tadpole
or two. Now this pond resembles
what the mind wants
heaven to be—not a simple
infinity but a closet
that stores all we’ve missed until
it’s needed. Piggy,
wherever you are, does
a hot spotlight still warm
your loneliness? Are you also
haunted by capers lost?  
And have you heard about
poor Nanny, left to a single
paragraph
on the back page of a paper
no one reads anymore? All I can
remember of her now is a song
whispered from a doorway
just before I sink
into dreams.

Afterlight

When the telephone rang later than usual, Nora thought it would be her son, Charley. He’d forgotten to take home the extra pizza when he left earlier. Maybe he’d want to come by for it after he finished jogging.

Nora’s husband, Paul, listened to the caller with a blank expression, then let the receiver slide through his fingers and drop to the base with a clack. “I have to go to the police station. Someone was found—a jogger—on the road near Charley’s cottage. Of course, it’s not Charley.” He reached for his corduroy jacket. He slid his arm into one sleeve, but the other arm got caught up and hung halfway. Nora pulled it the rest of the way for him. Paul patted his pocket where the phone was, but he did not call Charley.

“I’m going with you,” Nora said. She got her coat. Paul waited while she buttoned it.

The sheriff had been waiting and asked them to go downstairs to make an identification.

“Downstairs?” Nora asked.

“You stay here. I won’t be long.” Paul cleared his throat, the way he does when thinking things over. But she saw the fear in his eyes, the centers dark like exoplanets.

 When Paul came back, he shook his head. “It’s him. It was Charley.” He stared at the tile beneath them as if looking into a bottomless pit. “Let’s go home. Someone will call tomorrow to make arrangements.”

But when they arrived home, everything in the house seemed off-kilter—the floor slanted, the walls leaned in. Nora listened for the jiggle of bottles when Charley opened the refrigerator for water, for the thump of his car hitting a bump while pulling out of the driveway. These sounds seemed more possible than the reality that Charley was dead.

She heard Paul brushing his teeth. The bureau drawer squeaked as he opened it for his pajamas. Paul was preparing to go to bed, like any other night.

 Weren’t they going to talk about this? Didn’t his nose feel smacked into—like bumping up against a wall—as he faced the reality head-on? What did he imagine she would do with her grief? Didn’t his heart seize up? What would she do with her grief?

Nora didn’t understand. Paul was processing this occurrence as calmly as if he were viewing one of the faraway galaxies on his telescope. Why didn’t he tell her how he felt, deep and close, like when stepping into one of Charley’s bear hugs?

 If Paul wasn’t going to talk about it, then she wouldn’t either. Nora found herself thinking that, in fact, maybe the accident had not really happened at all. She put the leftover pizza, still on the counter, into the refrigerator.

On the third day, the sheriff’s office called to say that they were ready to release Charley’s personal effects. Nora went to pick them up. She could not wait until Paul returned from work to bring them home.

She received a plastic bag filled with Charley’s billfold and his clothes, no flashlight. His tennis shoes stacked on top. Nora saw dark streaks in the terry cloth fabric at the bridge of one shoe. She touched one of the blood spots through the plastic.

She took the shoes into the laundry room, poured out measurements of soap and bleach and softener, numbly taking each from their places on the shelf. When she submerged the shoes, the dried blood unraveled tiny red ribbons in the water.

 Paul stopped reading his journal and came in to find her loading the wet shoes into the dryer. “Why are you doing this?”

“I have to.”

“Impact with that much force will break the belt,” Paul said. “You’d better turn it off.”

“I want to wait until they are dry.”

“He’s not going to wear them again. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course, I know that. What a heartless thing to say.”

They were silent, standing face-to-face, locked in a motionless dance to the beat of the rubber soles hitting the drum. They were alone with each other, and each one alone.

Paul turned away. “You should come to bed,” he said, his voice trailing off as he went toward the stairs.

Nora sat down on the floor, let the banging continue on and on into the night. She listened to the sound of the rubber tennis shoes hitting the metal wall of the dryer. Bouncing in a closed place. The repetition lulled her, a clanging thud with every turn, two thuds, actually, because each shoe banged separately from the other. The repetitive bumping of the shoes was in fact soothing, the one predictable thing left.

When she finally did turn off the dryer, the silence in the house made her throat close against her need to scream. She looked out the back window, the yard dark now, and thought of Paul and Charley three days ago, near dusk, cutting the last of the wood from the fallen branches. Charley had come inside to eat pizza with them. He was excited, talking about his plans to return—again this summer—to the Pine Ridge Reservation. He asked if he could bring a stray cat he’d been feeding over to stay while he was gone. Had she hesitated too much in answering yes? Nora wanted to go back to that dusk, the cutting of the wood, the pizza, Paul walking out to the car with Charley. She wanted to start everything over.

Nora had trouble falling asleep when she went to bed. When at last she did doze off, she dreamed the same dream as the previous two nights. It was Charley—she was with him at the base of Brass Town Bald. He came toward her on the stone bed of the access road, a crunching sound. Against the night, the angles of the piled gravel looked like shards of broken tombstones. Charley bid her to follow, but before she could move, she woke.

She sat up, swung her legs around, and planted her feet on the floor beside the bed.

Her movement roused Paul. The bed creaked as he turned. “Can’t sleep?” he asked. “Again?”

“I’d like to go back into my dream,” she said.

“You never can go back into a dream, Nora.” Paul reached out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away. “You know that, don’t you?”

Nora rose and went into the guest room, opened the window to look out at the stars, but the sky was overcast. Nora listened for the raspy rhythm of a blade sawing wood, for the thunk of a sectioned trunk hitting the ground. She wished she could still smell sawdust in the air.

Nora turned on the light and opened the closet door, pulled out boxes that contained Charley’s possessions she had kept even after he’d moved away. She took out a beaded medallion from camp, a pine box car he and Paul made, a baseball glove from grade school. The inside of the glove felt snug and soft when she put it on her hand and held it out as though ready to catch something. 

~

Nora went looking for the stray cat by Charley’s cottage but never found it. She stopped trying once the “for sale” sign was removed. She could not bear to see someone else living there. Nora gave up her volunteer work at the hospital. She stayed home, cooking more food than they would ever eat and cleaning the house more than was necessary. One day looked very much like the next.

Near the end of the summer, Paul told Nora he was planning a trip to Brass Town Bald to set up his telescope. “It’s the best month to see the third closest spiral galaxy. Remember—we went with Charley last year.”

Nora said she would go with him even though the place he proposed was so far away that they would not return until after midnight. She did not tell him that each night, she went to sleep with the hope that Charley would appear in her dreams. She felt uneasy about being away from home in case Charley came looking for her. 

~

Nora helped carry the heavy tripod to the set-up spot in the deserted parking lot of Brass Town Bald.

Then she held down the styrofoam packing, which screeched as Paul lifted the telescope out. He seated it onto the tripod.

Last year, Charley had tried to persuade Paul to drive up the service road to set up on the observation platform on top of the mountain. But Paul preferred the convenience of unloading in the parking lot.

“The view would be worth the extra trouble. You can see four states,” Charley argued.

“Not at night you can’t.” Paul always found a reason to be right.

Paul angled the scope to the eastern sky. Tonight—like last year—Paul would look in the Triangular Galaxy. “Why did you want to come tonight—on this night in particular?” Nora asked. It had been a year ago, minus one day, that they had come here with Charley.

“The alignment. With a binary star, the orbit has to be just right to see two instead of one.” Paul’s field was stellar astronomy, and Nora knew he’d been observing this specific star for many years.

Paul put his hands on his hips, frowning at the clouds passing in the sky. “Last year was better,” he said.

Of course it was better. Last year we were here with Charley, Nora wanted to say. But Paul would not talk about that. He never would talk about Charley.

Paul looked into the finder trying to bring the galaxy into range. “My star’s there somewhere.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ll find it.”

“You devote a lot of time to finding something that may not even be there,” Nora said.

“We can still learn. Everything we learn about the universe we are learning about ourselves.”

“You sound like you’re lecturing one of your classes,” Nora said.

“You shouldn’t have come if you didn’t want to,” said Paul.

“No, I think it’s good if we do things like this together. We must try harder to do that,” Nora said. She knelt beside the light of the Coleman lantern to untangle the drawstring of the homemade felt bag that held the eyepiece.

Nora heard the whine of the motorized apparatus that synchronized the movement of the scope with the earth’s rotation. Years ago, he’d needed her to help. Now he used a computer program to get a fix on the star.

Paul attached the eyepiece, leaned close to turn the focus knob and sharpen the resolution. He would be completely absorbed in his efforts now, the same as he had been last year. That’s what had given Nora and Charley the chance to climb to the observation deck of the mountain.

 Now Nora regretted that she had decided to come back to this place with Paul. She shivered in the night air. She told Paul she was going to the car to get her jacket. But she walked past the car and went beyond where it was parked. She did not know where she was headed in this world thrown off its axis.

 From the wooded area, Nora heard the call of a night bird. This call—a rapidly repeated single note broken by the entreaty “come-with-meeeeeeee”—was the same as she and Charley heard last year. Nora stopped and looked back. Paul was a street block away. She saw his shape, dark against the sky now that he had extinguished the lantern light. He sat on a small, fold-up stool, leaning into the eyepiece.

Nora heard a twig snap. She heard Charley before she saw him.

“Ah, here you are,” he’d say. A shadow. He was standing in it.

She held her breath. Was this the part of the dream where he would disappear? She reached out to touch his arm. But he had already turned to start the trail.

“Remember the shortcut?” Charley’s raven-black hair was longer now than in the beginning of the summer. He always let it grow to his shoulders when he taught at the reservation.

“It’s only a half mile. But straight up,” he reminded her, ducking under the first branch.

The path was steep. Nora felt like her thighs were gripped in a vise. Was she more out of shape now having given up going to Tai Chi? Nora heard her own labored breathing. The night bird had stopped singing. There was no chirp of crickets, no rustle of a creature deep in the woods.

But soon she heard Charley whistling. He had learned to do that from Paul, through his teeth not his lips. Nora thought of Paul, alone, looking at his faraway galaxy. Did he realize yet that she was gone?

Nora’s feet were heavy and the toe of one shoe scraped the ground. She looked ahead.

Charley carried a flashlight that lit the trail. She followed the beam as it burrowed into the darkness.

Nora wiped the prickly sweat on her forehead with the tip of a paisley bandana she took from around her neck. Bushes at the side seemed dense and flowed like thick velvet curtains across a stage. “I think I see flowers,” Nora said, making out cream-colored appliqués sewn into the night tapestry.

The flowers were Silberlich, “silverlight.” She knew the species. The blossoms—cup-shaped with stiff, waxy petals—would bloom for a long time. Nora ran her finger over an unopened bud, expecting to feel tiny ridges like on the sugar stars with which she decorated birthday cakes. But, instead, what she touched felt like air.

“There it is,” Charley said, aiming the light beam on the bare plateau ahead. “The ‘bald’—did I ever tell you the story?” They stepped from the dirt trail up onto the rock.

“There were so many stories,” Nora said. “Tell me again.”

“I heard this from a Cherokee guy I met, the summer I rewalked the Trail of Tears.”

Nora felt a breeze—more detectable now without the buffer of trees around them. She wished she had brought her jacket from the car.

“Folklore has it that heinous winged beasts—with pointy scales and sharp-toothed mouths—swooped down from the treetops here and gobbled up all the small children.”

Nora felt fearful to be so out in the open. “That’s a terrible story,” she said. “The stories I made up for you as a child had happier endings.”

“So does this. Medicine men summoned good spirits to kill the beasts with fiery thunderbolts. The tribes were so grateful,” Charley continued, “that they vowed to keep this land clear of trees forever.”

“But how could the Cherokee keep that promise? Weren’t they rounded up and forced West?”

“Well, look around.” Charley swept his arm across the bare terrain. “Do you see? One single tree?”

“You got me there,” Nora answered with a ripple of laughter.

When they reached the other side of the plateau, Charley leaped from the rock and helped ease her down. “We’ve arrived.” He crossed the paved path that led to the stone stairway up to the first level of the observatory.

Charley did not hesitate. He climbed straightaway to the first level of a darkened visitor center with fixtures for bolting down telescopes. It was hard for Nora to keep up. Tall and lean like Paul’s side of the family, her long-legged son took one step for each two of hers, even up the dark and narrow steps to the second level—the observation platform and the fire tower.

Nora felt her pulse throb against her fingertips as she made fists, bent forward to gather strength for the final mount. Charley hurried so much that Nora felt alarmed. To her, he seemed reckless—hurrying ahead in this desolate place without worrying if a plank were loose or considering that a fugitive might be hiding out around the corner at the top. Although she felt it was dangerous, she followed him. She would follow as long as she could.

Charley stood at the second landing waiting for her with his arms folded behind him, expectant as though ready to watch her open a present.

Taking a final step onto the deck, she felt she was floating on a wave of starlight, winking overhead, and stretching to the four horizons. And below, throughout the rise and fall of mountain ranges, were more tiny patches of light. Signs of life glowed in white wisps like the Queen Anne’s Lace that grew wild in fields near Charley’s cottage.

“I feel like I am so high up that I’m part of your dad’s sky. I wish he had come.”

“Me too. Let’s see if we can find him. He may be closer than you think.” Charley walked the circular deck until they could see the parking lot—the size of a game board, a bare recessed swath cut into the forest.

“I’m going to signal Dad. Maybe he’ll see us.” He leaned over the rail and shined the light down so it flashed on the tops of trees.

 “The beam won’t carry that far,” Nora said. She knew there was no line of sight to where they stood.

“You never know what’s going to reach someone.” Charley jiggled the light. “Like the shy students I helped at the reservation with remedial math.”

Yes, he was going to tell her another story.

“At first I got no response—the kids are so afraid that they might give the wrong answer. But I noticed that some students had one hand on their desk. So I asked what’s 2 plus 3. ‘That’s right,’ I told them. ‘Five fingers. Five.’ Next thing I knew, students with both hands up pulled one hand off. They wanted to have the right answer too.”

Charley grinned at her triumphantly, shined the light back to glow on his face. “And greatest of all—one kid unclamped the hands folded in his lap and put one hand out on the desk—he wanted to show me the right answer too.”

He then turned the flashlight around so that it splashed on the foliage below like paint poured from a tilted can.

“No, your father won’t see that,” Nora said. “The only thing visible from down there is the top of the tower,” she added, pointing up.

Charley redirected the flashlight so that the beam scampered across the planks and up the clapboard sides of the firetower. The tall windows reflected the light in beacon-like streams.              “Maybe he’ll see this,” Charley said. “I want him to know I’m thinking about him. If he misses it, you tell him. You tell him for me.”

“Is that the reason you’ve come? For your father?” Nora asked.

Charley tilted his head to a lopsided angle and smiled broadly as he walked closer to her. She smelled the familiar acetic scent of his warm body, the same as when he was a boy. Overheated from playing in the summer sun, he would run to her for relief. She wanted to lift a loose strand of hair out of his eye, tuck it behind his outward-slanting ear.

Nora looked down at her fingers, curving as though sand was slipping through them. “Don’t leave.” Nora wasn’t sure if she said it out loud or only in her mind. “Stay longer. You could wait. We could make a deal for you to stay—it could be our very own agreement, between you and me.”

“But we can’t leave out Dad,” Charley said. He paused, maybe to give her time to take in what he had said. “And you know I have to go.”

Charley backed away slowly, looking up at the sky with resignation. His broad shoulders, long legs, lean-forward stance—they all wavered in the light and shadows. He turned. The sole of one shoe creaked and became fainter with each step as he faded into the night’s veil. The beam of his flashlight went black.

Sooner than she wanted, Charley was gone. Gone again. Could she have stopped him? No, she realized that she could not, despite her longing. She might as well have believed the truth of the stories she had told him as a child—how the moon would come and sit in his palm with a warm glow or that one of Paul’s galaxies would sail by and sprinkle a million stars in their hair.

A cold draft blew so hard that Nora had trouble standing. The blustery wind brought her a brutal declaration—no deal. It was the universe taunting her. You are foolish to think you could make a deal. She knew she would not see Charley again.

Clouds covered the moon, and the night became so dark that Nora could hardly see where she was going, could barely see one step in front of the other. She held tightly to the railing and carefully walked down the two flights of stairs to the paved passage below the observatory.

She crossed the blacktop to the mountain’s “bald” plateau. Something seemed to swoop down on her. But no, it was simply the cloud sweeping by and out of the way so that it no longer blocked the moon.

Nora shifted all her weight to her back foot and lifted the other to heft herself up onto the bald. Her grounded foot faltered, and she could not raise it as high. As it landed on a lower stone, the branch of a sapling pine caught the cuff of her pants. She heard the cotton rip as she pulled it loose.

After struggling to get to the top, she sat down on the hard, cold boulder. The moonlight shined down on the smooth surface, giving it the luminosity of an ice-covered pond. But darkness completely bordered the other side. Nora couldn’t imagine how she would find the trail through the woods and get back to the parking lot without a flashlight.

And then Nora saw a faint dot in the blackness. Its sound grew clearer—a sharp hiss, gas seeping from the Coleman lantern. Paul was coming for her. The bright bead burned an arc into the space around it—a pendulum swinging in rhythm to his body.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” she heard him ask as he crossed the bald.

“Why do you have the lantern so bright?” Nora asked. It gave off such a searing light that she could hardly see him walking beside it.

He set the lamp down and, with his left hand, turned the valve wheel to lower the light. His tone was reproachful. “Didn’t you consider that I would worry?” A fretfulness was in his voice. “You go off by yourself.” He stepped closer, trying to see her better.

“And so do you,” Nora said. “The countless hours you spend studying galaxies eons away, your towers of books and your endless calculations.”

Paul didn’t deny it. Silent he reached down to help her up. Nora realized he was using his left hand. “Why?”

“The edge of my finger got pinched. That’s all,” Paul explained. “The tripod collapsed unexpectedly.”

Nora felt a pang of guilt that she had not been there to help him. The steel legs were too heavy for him to hold in place by himself when folding up the tripod.

“I left so I could come up here with Charley,” Nora explained. She looked back at the observation center, at the fire tower, above them now like a diver about to make a plunge. “Did you see the light signal he made to you from up there?”

“He?” Paul paused and turned his face toward her. “You believe that you saw Charley tonight?” Instead of confronting her, Paul took a deep breath and turned away.

Nora reached out and pulled on the yoke of his jacket. “Did you hear what I said?”

He stopped and shifted his shoulder to pull the cloth loose as he looked back out of the corner of his eye.

“Charley was here tonight,” Nora said. She saw him blinking slowly with forced patience. “How could I have gone through the woods in darkness? Charley had the flashlight,” she said to convince him.

“Oh Nora,” he said. He looked up at the tower; he did not say if he had seen the light that Charley had flashed.

“Do you believe me?” Nora asked.

Paul tilted his head to look even higher, turned his attention to the stars overhead. Nora wondered if he was comparing this naked-eye view with the one through his telescope earlier. He said, “The light of stars in deep space glows for millions of lightyears across the universe, even after the star is gone.” He looked back at Nora. “I know you see things that you have to believe.”

“But this wasn’t my imagination. I saw Charley—and he was as real as you are now.” Nora put her hand on his sleeve. “I saw him tonight.”

“No, Nora. I am the last person who saw Charley alive. It was me who saw him last that night.” Paul brought his head and shoulders forward and down, drawing himself close to her. “The last moments. In the yard when he was leaving. After he’d come to help me split wood, after the pizza.”

“I was there too,” Nora said.

 “No, you were in the kitchen later.” Paul pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. “I went out to the car with him. I knew he’d still go jogging and I thought he should wear something more reflective—something lighter to show up in the dark.”

“He always wore that gray college shirt, even the mascot was faded,” Nora said.

“Charley brushed me off and I was peeved that he wouldn’t borrow my jacket. This one.” Paul raised his arm. The beige color swept the night air like a light-colored flag. Paul groaned. “I should have insisted.”

“But what happened wasn’t your fault, Paul.” The gas light was faint, and Nora could not see his face well, but she knew what he was feeling. Sensing the heaviness of his presence beside her, she was no longer misled by the mask of restraint he forced himself to wear. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened, Paul.”

Standing on the bald next to Paul, Nora realized that life’s horrors are more cruel than the fanged creatures that swoop over a plateau to devour children, as in Charley’s fable. And they are more devious than a commonplace thing, the ringing of the telephone later than expected on a Tuesday night.

No, the real horror is what happens next—really monstrous things happen—or that don’t happen—between a mother and father of a child who has died.

Nora picked up the lantern. She suspected that the pinch on Paul’s finger was deeper than he was letting on. They walked across the bald and saw the gap in the foliage at the same time. As they stepped down onto the dirt trail, clusters of trees met from each side, forming a loosely-crocheted canopy against the sky. The stars came in and out of view.

“Those snatches of light—they remind me of watching Charley’s home run ball glide above the treetops,” Nora said.

“It was the best hit of his life,” said Paul.

“It soared so high, sailed so long that we couldn’t imagine where it would land,” Nora said.

“Until we heard the glass break in the window of the house near the field,” said Paul.

“Yea, no wonder! He really did wallop it.” They stopped walking now, in the darkness, with the stars elusive behind the branches. “We wouldn’t have changed a thing. It was a great night for Charley.”

“It was also a great night for the glass repair man. I had to pay him double to fix it,” Paul said.

They laughed, the sound echoing back from the soft cover of foliage.

“I kept the ball even after Charley scoffed at me for being too sentimental,” Paul said, “I have it still. In the garage.”

“After all this time?” Nora asked.

“Every now and then, I wipe off the dust,” said Paul.

“You’ll have to show me,” said Nora.

They walked on as the trail tapered in. The span between their hands—like what was once the infinitesimal distance between them—narrowed as the pathway closed in. Nora felt Paul’s hand touch hers. Their fingers interlaced with one another and held tight the rest of the way down the mountain.

To be a man

don’t sob at the sight of your grandfather’s ashes stored in a mausoleum for war veterans and husks of grandfathers that once loved but have since formed their hands into oysters. He powdered the pearls. South of the Greyhound station, you once ate biscuits, drank orange juice against the violet dayglow of the morning. You try

to recall what stories he said back then, but no amount of trying unbuilds the mausoleum that houses how you see him now—ashes long since cooled, knuckles long since calloused. Look at the oranging picture they set beside his wrinkled lilies, the one where he held the husks of three doves lined in a row, bellies slipping out of slits. In the South, a man is nothing more than the pain he could inflict. You can form

anything into a marriage of shame and silence. Pick a wife with a curved form and lips of sweet meringue, whose dreams are just as soft and shallow. If you try to leave your birthright, remember your stepfather whose crew in southern Vietnam traded Polaroids of heads and ragged entrails as currency—ashy cheeks, eyes somehow always looking up. They were just carrion, husks. Look at your stepfather now—a man who holds more pride in Agent Orange

than in birthing two daughters—and how he once spat clustered bombs of orange napalm on weeping village wives. He goes to sleep so easy, like forming a fist. You must be like him, like your grandfather, like the carob husks of Morocco whose purpose is to wrinkle and burn and become powder. Try once more to leave your birthright, to never become deciduous. Even the ash that holds the Nine Worlds in its womb, even the palo verde of Southern

California that dances like fireworks or arteries, even you, one day, south of heaven, will become a mausoleum. Think of your mother, her orange blossom tea and her lacy summer dresses and how she made the world her ash—tray after her lips deflated and her skin leathered and she couldn’t terraform her womb to support two daughters. Your stepfather did his best. He tried to be good. You must empathize since you too feel that gravity (the need to husk

something from its shell, like the wives and daughters who strip husks of rice with warm hands and leathered feet, who live in huts in southern Bangladesh with hopes of never seeing a single plane in the sky). Try to remember how easy it can be to leave, to smoke a carton of orange Pall Malls in a rusting cerulean pickup like your birth father did, forming fingers into snakes or oysters or carob pods still hooked to the tree. You can ash

that cigarette anytime. Try as you might to escape your birthright, husks of doves and daughters are expected so that your own ashes can rest, south of heaven, where oranges will blossom, where a mausoleum will form.

Ghazal for the Cast Iron

Because I haven’t taken the bristle pad’s sudsy scraping grace
to scour this pan as I do all others, erasing the grease

of bacon and garlic, because in coarse salt and shortening
and three wadded up paper towels I trust, I grace

this pan with butter, the slick black metal muting
turmeric’s threadbare screams. So little of what we make we grace

with time’s peppered gristle. Even rot’s scrubbed clean by rain and soil.
But this held my grandmother’s hashbrown casserole, saving grace

of red potatoes. This my grandfather’s good eye, goose-white
and gleaming as he sizzled the hams of West Virginia, graced

his knotted stomach with the dinner he’d scarf beneath
the nightshift’s ochre light, a piece of himself saying grace

with each raised fork. When my mother died on a street smooth
as a skillet, my father cooked himself through grief. Tonight, no grace

of rain on bloody asphalt, but short rib seared until meat falls
from bone, the once-translucent onion darkening in a wine-swilled grace,

and I hold this grease-hiss of family with a singed oven mitt,
oil bursts saying: Josh, even from burning comes a little grace.

The Fish

At first,

the bags of water
walked:

through red deserts,
through green forests,
through gray cities.

And then,

the bags of water
talked:

about race,
about gender,
about equity.

And then,

the bags of water
balked:

over history,
over liberty,
over private property.

And then,

the bags of water
stalked:

demanding homogeneity,
demanding retribution,
demanding silence.

And then, 

the bags
of water became unstopped:

drowning libraries,
drowning classrooms,
drowning cattle, chickens, and pigs.

And when
the bags of water
were empty,

they danced in a circle,
and prayed for a river.

The dark sky answered
and afterwards,
it just

rained
and reined
and reigned:

soaking our yards,
soaking our bread,
soaking our shirts,
soaking our shoes,
soaking our soil,

until all that was left were the fish.

Brett Stout

Midnight Confessions of an Empire

Photography/Acrylic Paint/Staples - 11"x14" - 2023

The Violent Nothing

Photography/Watercolor Paint/Staples/Book Clippings - 12x18" - 2023

Van Gogh Never Did This

Photography/Acrylic Paint/Watercolor Paint/Staples/Film Negative - 11x14" - 2023

The art that I’m submitting has the basic overall theme of “creative destruction.” I’ve taken my own photographs that I mainly take while walking the streets of my town, while on vacation, or riding my bicycle late at night. Then, I get prints of my photographs made, and I take the original prints of various sizes and defile and deform them into something different. I almost exclusively do this with an assortment of random and common household items and products, as varied as drywall screws, nails, cleaning bleach, staples, watercolor paint, duct tape, etc. I transform and make new art from already existing photographic art. Nothing I make will be perfect when partaking in the chaotic creative process, nor is it meant to be. I don’t go into making this kind of abstract art with a plan or any sort of idea of how the finished product will truly look. The new art could come out in the end as anything. It truly is random and sporadic chaos, which adds to the appeal and originality of it.

52 Pick-Up

This story won the 2023 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Dad always said I didn’t have to pay him back for everything, but I knew that was a huge lie, the way that beautiful people wearing long wool coats say, “Sorry, no cash,” when I asked them if they want to see a card trick.

“You haven’t even seen the trick yet,” Dad would protest in Chinese, breaking his cover as an elderly deaf-blind gentleman sitting three seats down the subway car, and I would have to stop shuffling and say, “Shhh, Dad,” except I didn’t want to blow our cover even more, so I would change course mid-word, say, “Shhh, dear sir.” But sometimes he would be so mad and say, “Let’s go, Sammy,” and drag me out of the train car.

He wore a yellow armband of old caution tape that we’d modified to say “DEAF-BLIND: PLEASE BE PATIENT.” On top of that, he had old drugstore glasses that we’d Sharpied black to look like sunglasses and a beanie pulled down over his ears.

“Why do you have to be deaf and blind?” I asked him every so often.

“That way, there’s no way people would think we’re related,” he said, swinging me onto our kitchen counter so that I could practice pulling cards from behind his ears. “And that’s what you want, right Sammy?”

“Don’t say it like that,” I scolded him. “You know people pay more if they think I’m on my own.”

He still insisted on coming to watch me perform every weekend morning until he needed to leave for work, and people were sometimes alarmed to see a man wearing a DEAF-BLIND: PLEASE BE PATIENT armband spring up at Grand Central to kiss me goodbye and transfer to another train. I always had to switch to another train too, partly because people were staring at me, partly because I was so nervous when he left that I would try to do a thumb fan but my hands would shake all my cards to the ground. I had to walk the whole tunnel to Times Square to calm down.

Dad hated that I did street performances, but he still thought everything I did was amazing; and, I reminded him constantly, I did it for him. I didn’t like it either, but these performances were the only realistic way that I was ever going to earn enough to pay Dad back. If I waited until I was of legal working age I would be indebted beyond recovery. Plus, with my round cheeks and short legs I could shave a few years off when people asked me how old I was, which would almost always make them fork over more.

But I had to be careful of how deeply to discount my age. “Where are your parents?” the tourists would ask when I went too young, reaching into their tight jeans for their phones and dredging up ticket stubs and hop-on hop-off brochures. I would help them collect those scraps, smile my roundest-cheeked smile and say, “Don’t worry, I’m meeting my dad in a few stops.”

“Oh, sorry, I don’t have any cash,” they’d say, meaning, so why doesn’t he take care of you, and I’d hold out my hand with their wallet in it and say, “Credit card is fine too,” meaning, he does, why else would I be here, and by the time they’d realize I was joking and the wallet trick was all part of this show, the whole row of passengers would be staring. And I would have to switch trains then, too.

But it was all worth it when I got home and shoved the bills and coins in an old deli container and stuffed the container in the back of the freezer so that I couldn’t reach it without a stool. I labeled it DAD’S MONEY: DON’T USE. The words had to do. Dad and I had once tried to stop ourselves from spending money by freezing it in a block of ice, but eventually we wanted cheung fen for dinner and instead of waiting for the money to thaw, we’d brought the ice cubes to the cart downstairs. The old lady cooking inside shook her head and put the cubes on the griddle where they hissed until the dollars unfurled. We all looked closely to confirm it wasn’t a trick.

~

I started out just singing on the subway because it was the easiest to practice. We didn’t have a radio but on hot nights the neighbors who loved 92.9 FM Oldies would open their windows, and Dad and I would sit on our fire escape and sing into bowls so the sound would echo toward us. I told Dad he should go inside and relax, but he insisted he needed to be there to cover my ears when there were inappropriate lyrics. I used to sing, Take me down to the paradise city, where the hmm hmm hmm and the girls are pretty, before I realized that Dad didn’t know enough English to properly censor songs. After that, I still let him sit next to me on hot weather music nights, but when he fell asleep mid-chorus I wouldn’t disturb him.

“Sammy, why didn’t you wake me up?” he demanded whenever he woke up on his own, because his legs had gone numb from sitting on the grate or he’d drooled a rope of saliva long enough to lower us to the ground.

“I tried, but you were so tired,” I explained. “And if you help me, it just means I have even more to repay you for.”

“Dummy,” he would chuckle, swatting me upside the head. “You don’t need to repay me.” But I thought about the grass is green and decided he had it wrong.

It was actually my cousin Julia who gave me the idea of switching to card tricks because that’s all we played in her backyard: 52-card pickup. Uncle had so many free decks from visiting Atlantic City all the time, though the cards all had holes punched through or clipped corners. Julia would count down from ten and then toss the desk up into the air, and we would both try to collect the most.  Back then I sang so much, both practicing and performing, that my diet was just Halls lozenges that Dad swiped from streetside stands for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and my cheeks were constantly chipmunked with one lozenge on each side. It meant that Julia and I had very boring conversations.

“Do you want to play this game my dad taught me?” she asked, and I nodded because I would have leaked Halls syrup if I opened my mouth.

“Do you like it?” she asked me after we played a few times, and I shook my head.

“Do you know any other games?” she asked. Here, too, I shook my head, sucking hard on the lozenges, so she threw the cards again.

Dad and I visited every few months because Uncle didn’t know how to care for Julia as Dad did for me. Instead, Uncle had a lot of women visitors who would help take care of him and Julia until they realized Uncle wasn’t going anywhere, in the worst way, and they would abandon him in disgust. Uncle made Julia help prolong the relationships by pretending to be very precocious, but even that didn’t keep them around. She was like that the first time I met her, when we rang the doorbell of their apartment and she opened the door with glasses on and a very yellowed copy of The Prince in her hand.

“Oh, right,” she said when she saw us. She replaced the book on the milk crate that they used as a shoe rack, and took off the glasses, rubbing her temples.

“Brother, come in,” called Uncle from inside the house, and Dad went into the kitchen, leaving me with Julia. The house smelled like cigarette smoke and grass clippings. She eyed the notebooks and pencil case that I was carrying and came closer, hungrily.

“Can I see?” she said, already reaching out.

Dad got the money for my school supplies that year by making his hands a gun and sticking up the bodega down the street. They didn’t give him any money but they did call some hotline that summoned two counselors who escorted him back to our apartment. When I opened the door for him he produced a wad of wrinkled twenties and a Starbucks gift card. “The counselors linked arms with me as we came back, one on each side,” he said. “Left counselor had dirtier pockets but more money.” I was so proud of him, but mentally wrote it down as another entry in my checkbook, which brought me to sixty-four more weekends of singing on the train. When we went into the kitchen Dad was already explaining this all to Uncle.

“You just need to commit,” Dad explained to Uncle, smacking his palm with the back of his other hand. Uncle, who looked like a faded, oily version of Dad, paled even more at the thought, but still set down his cigarette to try it.

“Put your hands like this,” said Dad, showing Uncle how to interlace all his fingers except the pointers, and aim them at an imaginary head. “Now say stick them up!” Uncle could do it for a few seconds, but when Julia pretended to be the frightened cashier, he would unlock his hands and wave them in the air, saying, “It’s not real, it’s just a trick.”

“I know,” Julia would say, rolling her eyes and opening the sliding door to the backyard. Uncle’s ashy face froze like a mask, angry red diamonds blooming on both cheeks.

“Pathetic,” she laughed to me later, as she snatched the six of clubs from under my scrabbling fingers. We played in the backyard because Julia hated the smell of smoke. “He’s not even trying.”

“Well,” I said, feeling guilty for some reason, “you aren’t really trying either.”

“At what?” asked Julia.

I told her about singing on the train and the Sharpied sunglasses and PLEASE BE PATIENT. She laughed even more.

“Getting even is for people you’ll never see again,” she said. “I read it in that book.”

“I’m not ‘getting even,’” I said. “What would you know about that anyway?” But it was too late; I was already imagining Dad running out the closing subway doors on his way to work and the train falling off the tracks. I sat there thinking for so long that she eventually waved her hand in front of my face and said, “Hello? Sammy?” She had collected the whole deck on her own. Through the sliding glass door we could see that a small woman with a short perm had joined Dad and Uncle, and I think I saw Julia flinch, but she tossed the cards again and we watched them wag and flutter in the air.

~

It was a good thing I got the idea to switch to cards because my voice had started to sound like a cat’s tongue. We didn’t see a doctor, but we described my symptoms to one of Uncle’s lovers who had health insurance, who went to a doctor complaining of a sore throat, and a few weeks later she said her doctor thought she might have vocal cord nodules. “Stop singing,” she said, in her own raspy voice, fried from too many menthols.

We looked it up. Dad hotspotted our laptop by leaning off of our fire escape with his cellphone in his hand, which would just barely connect to the free city wifi.

“I’m no doctor, but Dad is a genius in other ways,” he had bragged when he figured this out. He was always beet-faced and white-knuckled with his eyes closed and I worried that when all the blood had finally gone to his head he would let go and fall into the street.

Once we learned that singing had knotted the strings in my neck, I snuck a deck of cards from Uncle’s stash and watched instructional videos at double speed and memorized them by repeating the words to myself to relieve him of internet reception duty as quickly as possible. For him, because I didn’t want him to fall into the street, but for me as well, because this was yet another service he provided me. And for the landlord, who would slip threatening notes under our door saying that we had to stop our hazardous behaviors.

“How’s my girl,” said Dad when he came in from the fire escape, and I said, tongue caught between my teeth as I practiced my pinky break over and over, “Very indebted, Dad, very behind on my bills.”

“You’re a child,” Dad laughed. “You have no bills.” As if that wasn’t my exact problem.

I practiced until my wrists were sore and then steamed them over the rice cooker to relax them, but my tricks always felt flat, somehow. I would fan the cards, ask Dad to pick one, take the card back, bring it to the top of the deck. “Is it the eight of clubs?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Dad, solemnly from his chair, as if swearing an oath.

“You don’t seem excited,” I said. “I found your card.”

“I knew you would find it,” he said. “You’re my amazing girl.”

“That’s not the point,” I told him, throwing the deck across the room in frustration, and in a few hours I would find the deck re-stacked, in order, clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. I had explained to him before that I didn’t want the cards ordered, that I would just need to reshuffle them so that people didn’t think I had somehow organized the deck to help me find their card. He’d tapped my forehead and said he wanted to make sure he had picked up every card.

“It’s easy to miscount,” he’d said, “but it’s hard to miss the order of things.”

When I asked Julia about the card pickup game the next time we visited, she laughed in my face. “That’s such kid stuff,” she said, tossing the deck of cards back to me, messily so that I only caught about half and had to scramble for the others.

“Why then?” I asked. But she was already stalking down to the kitchen and asking Uncle where her bookbag had gone.

“I don’t know,” said Uncle, busy stroking his new lady’s hair. She had tattooed eyebrows and very red glasses. Julia stopped short once she saw that they were both smoking indoors. She’d told me that he used to leave the house to smoke to try to protect her baby lungs, and he would walk all the way to the city and back smoking an entire pack. At some point he’d gotten tired of leaving.

“I said I don’t know,” said Uncle, looking up and seeing Julia still there. “What else?”

She just stared, which made Uncle look down at the cigarette in his hand and then wave dismissively at her, but she was already opening the sliding door and disappearing into the backyard. I thought she sounded like she was about to cry, but when I caught up to her she was sucking air like crazy and I realized she’d been holding her breath.

“Want to see a card trick?” I asked after a minute of her gasping, not knowing what else to say.

“What are you talking about?” said Julia in a carefully normal voice, and I started explaining the card tricks and fire escape to Julia, and she narrowed her eyes and snorted.

“You’re still on that?” She left me holding the pack of cards in the middle of the grass and went to sit on the concrete steps by the house. I went back inside.

She did eventually play with me that evening, as the sun started oozing all over the backyard. I found her squatting over a patch of grass, her head almost between her knees, her shadow dribbling long across the grass. When I got closer I saw she was arranging a handful of periwinkle stems and puffball dandelions around a dead bumblebee.

“What,” she said, looking up when my noodle of a shadow licked over her. It was less a question and more a greeting. She glared at me for a second before continuing to knit her daisy chain, which snaked around her feet.

“That’s such kid stuff!” I crowed, towering over her.

“No, it’s not,” said Julia. “I’m decorating his grave.”

“What,” I said, echoing her. I waited for her to explain but she kept arranging her pile of flowers.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the game?”

“Not a game,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. Then she ordered me to collect more dandelions and more of those weeds that dripped white sap when we broke the stems, which I did because it seemed so important to her. She piled them up until no one would’ve known that there was a bee inside.

“Now we pay our respects to our dearly departed, but we do not cry,” she said in a voice that said she had read more books than me. She squatted down and nudged the back of my knees so that I would do the same. After a minute of squatting my toes were numb and my knees were screaming, but Julia did these deep breaths with her eyes closed. Her exhales ruffled the grass and made the tufted seeds twirl on the dandelion head.

“Hello? Julia?” I said, but she didn’t open her eyes. I knew it was on purpose because she swatted in my direction. “What are you doing?” I asked, louder, but then she just started ignoring me. By the time she was done praying or whatever I was sitting on the grass just studying her legs, which were plumper than mine: the tendons in her ankles ropy, her calves and thighs squeezed tightly against each other like unopened hot dog buns. She stood up and shook her head at me, looming against the sky from my place in the grass.            

“I got tired,” I protested.

“Yeah,” she said, shaking out her legs. “Who’s not trying now.”

~

“How did you get Sammy to fear you?” Uncle asked Dad. A few months later he was smoking indoors again, so Julia was outside even though it was raining. She stood against a section of the under the eaves, but the rain was light enough to blow at a slant, so she was rain-dark all down her front anyway. I was crouching by the open sliding door, nose poked out so I could breathe clean air, too.

“Sammy doesn’t fear me,” Dad said. I heard the clink of a teapot lid and then the hollow knocking that meant Uncle was taking out a new cigarette. “Sammy thinks that she’s indebted to me somehow.”

“Same thing,” said Uncle, coughing lightly. “How do I get Julia to think that?”

Dad was quiet for so long that I thought he’d left somehow without me hearing. “I don’t think you want that,” he said eventually.

“Don’t I?” said Uncle. They were quiet for a few more minutes and I turned Dad’s sentence over in my head. Why wouldn’t Uncle want that? I ran through all the ways in which Julia and Uncle owed each other: Julia, beholden to Uncle for his card packs and tolerance for her sour spells; Uncle, beholden to Julia for making her stay outside all the time and wearing glasses that made her head hurt. They were much closer to even than Dad and I were, I thought, but because neither of them made any attempts to resolve their debts, I would likely repay Dad first.

“Remember when we were young boys, waiting for Ba to come home from work, and you threw a rock into the window trying to hit me?” Dad asked.

“You threw it at me,” said Uncle, and they both laughed. From the sound of it, Dad smacked Uncle across the chest, or maybe the other way around. I had a sudden vision of Dad and Uncle sweaty and skinny in dust-stained shirts, chasing each other around a rock-lined backyard.

“He cleaned up the glass himself,” said Dad. “Straightened up the whole room. Didn’t even say anything to us. And then he slept in the living room because he said the wind would stunt our growth.”

They didn’t say anything for a long time, and my legs started to fall asleep again. I tried to stretch them one at a time but my ankles gave out and I thudded onto my back.

“Sammy,” said Dad, walking around the kitchen island to discover me. “Why are you hiding here?”

“I’m not hiding,” I said, offended that he thought I would trick him, and I slipped outside to stand beside Julia.

Julia and I stood silently until I decided to pick a fight, because I was in a bad mood from listening to Dad and Uncle, and because I was suddenly sick of Julia acting better than me, like she deserved what she had. Of course I started by telling her that she never tried being nice to Uncle, no wonder he hated her, that I would be so angry if I were him.

“I heard him say that he wanted you to be more like me,” I said, leaving out the part where Dad said that Uncle wouldn’t want that.

“At least my Dad doesn’t force me to beg on the subway,” said Julia, barely looking at me. She kept shredding pieces of crabgrass between her fingers, like sticks of string cheese, and the wet strands clung to her fingers.

“I’m not begging,” I said, too late, flabbergasted at how wrong she had it. My mouth flapped for words for so long that I swallowed some rain. “I’m working. I need to be there.”

“Whatever,” said Julia. She made a face and wound her hands around each other a couple times, and then bowed weirdly and looked up at me with puppy eyes. “Let me show you a card trick,” she whined, “don’t you want to see a card trick?” She shook her hands and some grass fell off like confetti. “You think that’s what normal kids do?”

On the bus home, I almost told Dad what Julia said. I always told him everything, to avoid keeping anything from him that would be valuable. But I didn’t want to ask him

“Would you be mad if I stopped doing card tricks,” I whispered in his ear.

“No,” he whispered back. “I would be happy.” At this I rolled my eyes and hummed the paradise city song.

~

A few months later, Dad came back from work and told me the news: Uncle had gone for a walk again, but he hadn’t come back for a week now. We found out because Julia had waited to be picked up from school until it was dark and then slept on one of the couches in the principal’s office. As he told me about Julia, Dad had his bare feet in the dishwasher which had just finished running, so all the steam washed around his heels. He had been laid off last month, so he was temporarily working as a loader at a warehouse, where he said the conveyor belts moved faster than our wifi.

It was my turn to lean off the fire escape so that he could search for jobs. I didn’t realize that the hardest part was locking my feet under a metal bar to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally fall off, how numb his feet must have gotten when I was learning my card tricks. But I got through it just by thinking about how much I still owed him. The time he jumped down into the subway tracks to retrieve the eight of diamonds that I’d accidentally dropped. The time we ran out of hot water so he poured warm water through a colander for my shower. The time he got a plate of free samples, but was turned away because they recognized him, so he used his pocket-knife to hack off half of his hair, got a second plate, and then hacked off the other half for a third. I thought of so much that I often started to cry, big sobs that made my body buck up off the railing. When he finally heard me and came to investigate, he declared that he would stop searching for jobs.

“No, no,” I begged. “Just tell me what you do.”

“I just close my eyes and wait,” he said. That night I recycled another note from the landlord that said that this was our LAST WARNING.

We picked up Julia and on the train I told her that she was going to live with us from now on. She picked at her food at the dinner table and used her phone data, which made me resent her even more. I made room for her in my bed, taking a string and running it down the middle of the mattress. When she saw that she laughed and immediately put her feet over it, and I stormed to the bathroom.

I came back after brushing my teeth with toothpaste that I bought for Dad, and I was running my tongue over my front teeth when I heard her breathing hard under the blanket.

“Julia? What’s wrong?” I asked, burrowing under the blanket to find her curled up facing away from me. Her breath stank, steaming up the whole blanket. It smelled like she hadn’t brushed her teeth in a while.

“What’s wrong?” she shot back, thickly. “Oh, nothing.”

I sat quietly for a few minutes, trying only to breathe when I absolutely had to. I thought about Uncle asking Dad how to get Julia to fear him, and how Dad and Uncle had smashed open a window but Grandpa had cleaned up the glass silently, with Dad and Uncle maybe sheepishly standing in the kitchen with their hands behind their backs, not offering to help but feeling as if they needed to stop what they were doing.

~

When we woke up the next morning Julia was gone, the rumpled dimple next to me barely warm. Dad and I ran outside to try to find her but couldn’t. The cheung fen lady said a girl came to buy a box of zhaliang with freezing cold quarters, and I almost screamed. I ran back up the stairs just to check what I already knew was true: the deli container lid was askew, and the insides were empty as they were when we’d drained it of its original wonton soup.

“Julia is a thief,” I fumed to Dad, and he pinched my ear sharply.

“Julia is your cousin,” he said. He stared at the empty container, and I almost waved my hands, trying to bring him back. But I waited instead, watching his eyes glaze over, the same way he looked at the sky when he was hotspotting me, the same way Julia looked at Uncle when he was smoking. We stood there until his eyes started to water, and then he said, “Oh, Sammy,” like he was choking, and reached out and squeezed my hand.

Julia called from an unknown number a week later. I was filming myself for practice, trying to stop wrinkling my eyebrows and holding my breath whenever I did the double-lift, and when the phone rang I ran outside so that we could call over wifi, another of Dad’s tricks to save on a phone bill. I leaned all the way off the fire escape, which the landlord had blocked off with caution tape a few days before, and turned the phone on speaker so that I could hold it closer to the reception spot.

“Tell your dad that I’m okay,” she said, staticky and faraway, my arm and her voice waggling high above the street. “And also that I borrowed the cash he’s storing in the freezer to print some ‘Reward: Missing Person’ fliers.”

“The cash I’m storing!” I shout into the phone, nearly slipping my foot from the railing. “Where are you going?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and I could hear the smirk in her voice.               

She said see you later and I was too late to answer because I was trying to remember what she said that one afternoon, how small the bee was in comparison to the pile of flowers, how Julia breathed so hard it started to bald the dandelion puffs that we’d stuck in the roof of the crypt like little fairy globes, how when I looked outside the next morning, the pile was scattered all over the garden like confetti, the bee nowhere to be seen. Julia was already outside with her hands on her hips, like she’d volunteered to clean up a party to which she hadn’t been invited. And I knew, remembering the sturdiness of her legs and the way our whole family spent so much time staring into the distance, that she could be out there waiting for so, so long, just looking at nothing forever.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 1. Click here to explore other stories from this issue.

Kreative Kwame

Through the Walls of Colorism

Et Tu Brute

The Window

Traditional healers and “sorcerers” have over the years claimed that people with albinism are “ghosts” who never die but merely disappear. In many parts of East Africa, people with albinism are targeted for their body parts, which some believe hold magical powers and bring good fortune. Albinism is a genetic condition that causes a deficit in the biosynthesis of melanin, a pigment that colours the skin, hair and eyes. “banaoroko” is an aspiring artist. I met him at a theatre close to where I work. He was there for rehearsal for a talent show due the next day. I introduced myself to him as an aspiring photographer and said I’ll love for us to make visual statements together. He opened up to me about dealing with colorism. “Dealing with stares from birth sounds a bit tough, but you get used to it” he said. We went on to plan a creative shoot which was so fun! I learnt a lot from him. Here is our visual statement.

---

The year 2019 was revolutionary for me. Amidst an internal conflict in my country Cameroon that had been going on for 3 years, changing the very way we live, I found the courage to share my love for art and created my IG page where I hoped to share my creations. 

I could never imagine this journey will lead me here. It was an escape from the realities we faced. I remember searching “how to edit cinematic photos that tell a story” on YouTube. I immediately went out with my then iPhone 7 and began shooting expressive photos. I’ve always liked the idea of creating photos in a series accompanied by an essay on the theme chosen. The interpretation of these often thought provoking photos that touch on different subjects is left for the viewer to decipher for themselves. 

Lior Locher

Childhood

Daddy's Study

Longing

I work in mixed media, printmaking. This usually involves several of these: acrylic paint, ink, marker pen or color pencil, paper weaving, collage and printmaking and performance. I just launched my first film. I love bright colors and media that dry quickly so you can add more layers. Printmaking adds science, whimsy and cool kit, elements that are fixed and yet vary from print to print. Collage was my first love and still plays a prominent role. It started with travel ephemera and a fascination with Japanese origami paper and traditional patterns while living there, and has since expanded to anything that’s flat and sticks. In my other life I trained in personal development, coaching and psychotherapy as well as teaching different styles of yoga. I continue to be fascinated by our inner lives as humans, how we make sense of our own journeys and experiences, and how our mind and body come together. Our lives always involve picking up what already is, at that point in time, and recombining it to move forward, adding our own flavor. Often ripping things up and starting again, layers and sedimentations that form over time into something uniquely ours. That applies to life and art. Mixed media work is a great way to capture this.

Letter from the Editor

Dear reader,

When Andy Plattner asked me to join the editorial team of The Headlight Review in the spring of last year, I brought along my history of editing literary magazines in the Midwest. Although I was prepared to find the South different from the Rust Belt, it didn’t occur to me that even the literary magazines here might be just a little bit different.

At least according to its mission statement, THR does not focus on regional literature. And, yet, by virtue of our place, our staff, and our contributors, we find hints of the New South in the pieces of this issue. Without seeking them out, we have stories of racial tension and progress here in the South, poems of southern music, food, and masculinity, and, of course, we have southern ghosts. The pieces of this issue explore our struggles to come of age, to understand ourselves, and to wrest language into authentic service.

The editorial team and I are proud to present this collection of fiction, poetry, and artwork as a testament to the brilliance of our authors and our own efforts to serve authentically in the last six months. In that time, we also awarded the 2023 Grooms Prize, judged by Anna Schachner. Begun to honor Anthony Grooms for his service here at KSU and his contributions to literature, the Grooms Prize awards $250 and a bespoke publication to a piece of quality short fiction. This year’s winner, Anita Lo’s “52 Pick-Up,” reveals a bold new voice confronting the difficulty of family and growing up. It appears in this issue alongside our two other finalists for the prize.

We have restructured the journal’s masthead for this issue, and I want to thank our guest editors, Gregory Emilio and Melanie Sumner, who edited our poetry and fiction sections respectively. Their hard work and insight have shaped those sections, and we’re immensely fortunate to have the benefit of their contributions.

Brittany Files, our Managing Editor, has been essential to sustaining THR as I came into this role. Brittany designs and publishes the website, works with our authors, and, in short, makes this publication possible, and I thank her for her service.

We also benefited this year from the hard work of Antwan Bowen, who serves as THR’s Social Media Manager, and I thank him, too, for his dedication to learning the ins and outs of publishing and for advocating on behalf of the magazine and our activities.

Finally, I want to thank Andy Plattner for offering me the opportunity to join this team. Though he will deny it, his dedication to THR has driven the journal from its inception. I’m happy to report that Andy and I have undertaken many exciting initiatives to carry his vision into the future. We’ve begun producing interviews with authors, planning a series of critical writings, undertaking some community service activities, and even designing a print edition of the magazine. About all of which, more in the next issue.  

With this issue, we recommit ourselves to our mission to promote new creative writing that demonstrates the persistent value of imaginative literature. I’m especially excited to emphasize the diverse perspectives of this issue and to encourage many more new and emerging writers to join us in exploring what it means to find ourselves in a new place and a new time still haunted by the legacies of our past.

Sincerely,

Kurt Milberger, Editorial Director

A Love Note

Our arrangement was simple enough. I was with Gloria the first and third weekends of the month; Ollie and Gloria were together the second and fourth weekends. Weeknights were infrequent and scheduled ad hoc. Gloria and I had regular dates at a few bars, with an occasional wedding when called upon. Ollie and Gloria mainly frequented American Legion halls and maybe some family gatherings, as far as I knew. Nothing fancy, but enough to keep us all interested. 

We settled into our routine with a regularity that made it difficult to remember our previous, more independent, lives. Of course, there were bumps in the road: Ollie occasionally wanted Gloria on one of my weekends or we had a conflict around a holiday, but not often, and we always navigated any obstacles smoothly. It seemed as if we could go on like this forever. 

It probably helped that Ollie and I had been longtime friends before Gloria came on the scene. We had known each other practically our whole lives, growing up in a small town in North Dakota. We ate barely edible school lunches together and had sleepovers in elementary school. We navigated the complexities of middle school at each other’s sides. We even sat next to each other in the high school band, with Ollie on the tenor sax and me on trumpet, our instruments mirroring our stature in the class photo. We lost touch for a time after high school, but we never stopped being friends. 

Now, many years later, after separately moving to Minneapolis, we had become reacquainted through the small world of gig musicians. Our friendship picked up where we left off, easy-going and without drama, close in the sense of men who have no desire to talk to each other of difficult things. We maintained our connection by watching sports on television, or by drinking cheap beers around a bar while talking about sports we had watched on television. True to form, we did not discuss details of our time with Gloria or really anything related to Gloria, other than changes to our schedule.

All of which led to my confusion at lunch one day when Ollie asked, “Don’t you think it’s time one of us moved on from Gloria?”

The question hit like a gut punch, made worse by his breezy inflection that implied, in his mind at least, the matter already had been settled and I’d be the one moving on. 

“What do ya mean? End it . . . just like that? I don’t under—” 

“I don’t think there’s a formal process for this sort of thing.” 

“That’s not what I . . . I mean, how do we decide who ‘moves on?’”

Ollie did not respond, so I filled the silence: “Anyway, I like sharing. That way we can both look after her.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Ollie said. “I just think it’s time for a change, that’s all . . . it’s not like we’ll stop being friends if we don’t share Gloria.” 

That was it. I jerked our conversation to more comfortable ground. First, baseball—“Do you think the Twins will make a move at the trade deadline?”—and then, music—“Have you seen any jazz at the Dakota lately?”—talking rapidly and more than usual, afraid of what Ollie might say to fill any gaps in the conversation. 

As is often the case, the end of this whole affair was not immediate. Gloria and I had a number of beautiful weekends together. I remember one night at a German American bar where it seemed we could do no wrong. We swayed in harmony on the dance floor to the Snow Waltz, kicked up our feet a bit to the Tipsy Polka, and even tried a tango. The night seemed to last forever and pass in an instant, as only the most memorable times do. Of course, Ollie had his time with Gloria too. And, of course, I continued to remain in the dark about where they went together.

Everything seemed back to normal, yet I could not shake the feeling that we were all on borrowed time together. Toward the end, I found myself holding Gloria more tightly, moving together for an extra song or two, under the harsh glare of the overhead lights and the occasional wary glances from staff as they scrubbed the glassware and did a cursory wipe of the bar and tables at closing time. 

Of course, I regret my inaction in the moment. Looking back, I had plenty of opportunities to avoid the disaster that ensued. I should have been proactive. I should have fought for Gloria like a true literary hero. I am not one to blaze my own path, though, and there are not many love stories involving our triangle of two musicians and an instrument. You see, Gloria is not a woman; she was—she still is—an accordion.  

It is possible this revelation may mitigate your empathy for my tale of heartbreak. If that is your reaction, I feel nothing but pity for you. On the contrary, as only the lucky souls who have held an accordion can attest, it makes my account more profound. 

Unless you have played your own accordion—actually hugged one to your chest as you felt her breath move in and out, matching the rhythm of your heartbeat—I can’t expect you to understand the relationship an accordionist has with his instrument. The way other instruments are played—the pursed-lip kiss of a trombone, the soggy taste of a saxophone, the plunking of cold piano keys, the violent banging of a drum—make them simply inanimate objects in your hand. 

An accordion, on the other hand, comes alive as you gently massage her keys, warmed by your own hands during an hours-long embrace in which she continuously changes form, gracefully expanding and contracting. Like any desirable woman, an accordion is both welcoming and independent, granting you the opportunity to join your voice with her melodic tones or to simply enjoy her sweet music. 

I’m not ashamed to admit that I remember my first time with Gloria as vividly as I remember my “first time.” When I first held her, I knew we were made for each other and that her music would be the sweetest I could ever hope to play. When I looped in Ollie to help pay for Gloria, I assumed he would feel the same way. I guess I cannot expect most people to understand the connection that I felt with Gloria, but Ollie, he should have known. We were a part of a small but vibrant community of accordion players enjoying a renaissance of sorts—at least in our small part of the world—driven by the improbable convergence of the elderly yearning for tradition and young people embracing the retro irony of a good polka or waltz. 

Perhaps none of that matters now. What does matter is that I called Ollie one Friday morning to arrange a time to pick up Gloria. I asked when I could stop by, and I was answered by a long pause. Finally, Ollie said the five words that always presage doom: “You had better sit down.”

“What is it?” I asked. 

“I don’t have the accordion.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have Gloria. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.” 

“Yesterday? When were you planning to tell me?”

“I was hoping to find it.”

It. A subtle, yet significant, shift in terminology, like switching to the past tense when discussing a person who is chronically ill or gone missing.  

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so Ollie continued, “I had the accordion in my car when I stopped by the grocery store, and when I got home it wasn’t in there. I must have taken it out of the trunk to make room for my grocery bags and forgot to put it back in.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t process my life without Gloria. I knew that I could scrape together enough money to buy another used accordion, as I eventually did, but it was Gloria I wanted. Anyway, what was she doing in the trunk? And dammit, she’s not an “it.”

With no idea how to respond, I started peppering Ollie with obvious suggestions. “Did you go back to the store parking lot? Did you check inside the store to see if anyone turned it in? Did you ask any of the other customers?” 

We did our due diligence, of course. Ollie and I returned to the store together, and at least in my case separately on numerous occasions, to see if anyone had turned in Gloria. I walked through the parking lot nearly every day, hoping to catch a glimpse of Gloria next to a parked car. The store employees grew to know me, although the recognition that showed on their faces as I approached the customer service counter gradually evolved from welcoming to exasperated as the days passed. After a time, I started shopping at another grocery store to avoid reminders of Gloria’s absence in my life. 

We even stopped by the local police station for help, where we were politely informed that, based on the facts, the accordion was considered abandoned, such that there was “no potential violation of the criminal code requiring investigative action.” When I took it upon myself to seek surveillance video from the parking lot a city official efficiently closed the bureaucratic loop by requiring a search warrant to view any footage.

While pursuing the dead end of police assistance, we sought help from our community. We took refuge in the new town square and posted notices on Facebook and our neighborhood social networking site next to announcements of lost pets, yard sales, and complaints about neighbors not picking up after their dogs. We tweeted about our plight and scoured Craigslist multiple times a day for a post listing our beloved Gloria for sale, presumably at much-too-low of an asking price.

Leaving no stone unturned, and having no success with our online posts, we appealed to our actual town square. We tacked up handwritten signs around our neighborhood anywhere we could, including a Starbucks, a bookstore, a diner, a liquor store, and the grocery store where Ollie last had Gloria:

LOST ACCORDION!!!

Reward for Return!! Two free performances of your choosing!!

Last seen Thursday afternoon in the Lunds parking lot. 

The accordion was in a soft backpack case, root beer brown color, torn on one edge.

If found, please call Ollie (612-xxx-xxxx) or Pete (612-xxx-xxxx)

No Questions Asked! Just a Reward!!!

Even as we went to all this effort, we knew none of this would work. We had a sense of obligation, but never a feeling of hope. It was obvious, at least to me, that Gloria was gone forever; anyone lucky enough to have her now would be a fool to give her up. Knowing that, I moved on eventually, at least in the way that we all convince ourselves to go forward after suffering a loss. I suppose I even stopped thinking about her as much, although it was harder when I played at some of our old spots. 

Around this time, after I had remade my life without Gloria, I was on a long winter walk one evening and ducked into a small corner bar to warm up and have a whiskey. I heard her before I saw her. Her sound was unmistakably pure. I looked past the bar muddled with aging regulars sitting next to young hipsters and saw Gloria in the hands of another musician. He was about my age, and he was seated comfortably on a small stage in the corner of the room. My first impulse was to rush toward her and wrestle her away from the man holding her, but something about the music made me stop. I had never heard such lyrical sounds from her or from any accordion for that matter. I sat near the door and listened transfixed. 

When the set finally ended, I approached the other musician warily. “You sound great,” I said, cringing at the sound of my rising inflection. “I play as well . . . I really enjoyed your music.”

“Thanks,” he answered. He was sipping on a bottle of Grain Belt, his other arm draped over Gloria as she rested on his lap. “Oh, I’m Bill.”

“Pete,” I said with a nod. I longed to reach out and touch Gloria. Bill set his beer down on a side table and we shook hands. “That’s a beautiful accordion. Where did you get her?”

“I bought it a few weeks ago . . . at that music shop on Lake Street. It was used but had clearly been well cared for.”

“I don’t—” 

A group of young women brushed past me, each holding a rum and coke that was clearly not their first of the evening. They crowded around Bill and Gloria for a selfie. Bill shrugged his shoulders as they retreated to their table to post their photo. 

 “I was going to say . . . I don’t think I’ve seen you playing before.”

“Probably not. I just moved here from Wisconsin a few months back. I’m substitute teaching now . . . but I’m trying to get a full-time music job at one of the elementary schools. Since substitute’s pay is for crap, I decided to supplement my income by playing some accordion again. I haven’t played in a while, but it’s helping pay the rent for me and my boy.” He looked down. “Times have been leaner since my wife left us.”

I paused. I thought about telling him the whole story and demanding that he return Gloria, perhaps selling my own accordion to pay him off or working out some sort of trade. But then I remembered the beautiful music Gloria made as I listened to her that evening. It was clear that he needed Gloria more than I did, and perhaps, she needed him to reach her full potential. As if by Divine Providence, at that moment I heard Sting singing over the bar’s speakers, “If you love someone, set them free . . . Free, free, set them free . . . .” Dammit. Sting was right. 

I pulled out a five-dollar bill and stuffed it into Bill’s tip jar. “From one musician to another.” He tipped his beer in my direction as thanks. “Good luck landing that teaching job. And take care of that beautiful instrument, will ya?” 

With that, I took a last look at Gloria. I impulsively reached out my hand to feel her smooth wood case before I turned and quickly walked out of the bar. As I stepped outside to walk home, I paused to breathe in the crisp winter air, my mind as peaceful as the night sky filled with falling snow.

Madeline O’Neill

Muslim Woman and Child

Hidden

Banner Man

In my work, I strive to highlight the hardships many minorities endure at the hands of American society and the modern world. Typically, this inspires me to use my platform to emphasize the resilience and passion of the Indigenous population of North America, also those of the Muslim religion. It is important to bring forth the power and impact Indigenous cultures have on modern society, as we are advanced because of their diverse and inclusive culture. We should strive to have such diversity in our lives as well! 

Tyrone Mckie

Becoming the Sun

Head Storm

Nature Sees You

My artistic practice delves into the complexities of human experience, using digital paintings and digital collages as my tools of exploration. Drawing pencils capture fleeting ideas from my inner world and the world at large. These then transform into surreal digital paintings brought to life in Photoshop. With my digital collages, I curate fragments from various media sources, weaving them together to build a rich tapestry of imagery and often typography. As in our lives, where seemingly disparate elements coalesce to form our unique narrative, this artistic process reflects the interconnectedness of reality.

At its core, my art fuels a journey of self-discovery and a yearning to understand the world and universe around me. It's a visual conversation that invites viewers to explore their own emotions, ponder their place in the grand scheme, and engage with the questions that lurk beneath the surface. My work doesn't often offer easy answers, but instead invites contemplation and reflection, encouraging viewers to appreciate the beautiful complexities and contradictions inherent in being human.

Self Portrait as a Blushing Petal, Nestled into the Melt

I felt the seams of sky loosen and balloon over us the day I pedaled to your house, / my white skirt billowing behind me. Before, the ache did not disturb. Before, I clung to my / wake, vermilion and veined. I don’t know why the sun raked at my back, intensely begged me / to make my way to you. Does a crocus question / its readiness to bloom? Del Playa stretched open—this is where we kissed, the saltiness sealing familiarity on our lips. How many blackflies / have swarmed us since the night, digging us a ditch, / picking up next fight? Rousing our panic / like scattering field mice? But we floated / above this traffic, our bodies satin / in suspension, the tendrils / of our fingers irreversibly / and invisibly tangled, / and I can’t / and won’t / explain / this enigma, / a sweet fragrance / of red hibiscus / glazing over us / This stem, aerial, and erect. / These stipules, present, and free. / Our fusion protects a younger leaf— / look how she collects the dew, drinks in light / every time laughter shakes our joints. She may never know / how we suffered and recovered from two hard frosts. The blight crystallized, / thought never hardening us. I prefer this side of the story, how we came out warm. / and a bit weathered on the other end. I want to cup the syrupy smell in my hands again.

for her, an offering / of what love can cocoon. / Maybe now it’s plumeria / perfuming this place, / interlaced with the urge to love you / harder, love you even when / the biggest freeze of all towers over us, / livid and lethal. And yet-this stem, deep-rooted. / This blushing petal, nestled into the melt- / shivering in the delicate spring wind. / when you cradle me, heat flares. / When the stars spin / in wild directions, / you say, Burn, burn, / and explode into everything / you touch.

Sanctuary

Not enough of us in that neighborhood

to make teams, but we had two patches

of woods straddling the road that led

maybe a quarter-mile from our corner

to the drive-in. Only a few acres, but enough

for a world of exploration. Unlike our own neat

yards, with careful trees and well-tended

aromatic roses. No one tended the woods.

If my father wanted firewood,

I could lead him to the windfalls.

Otherwise, none of the adults ventured

into our woods. Mostly the place was abandoned

except for me and maybe another kid,

never more than three of us,

poking around in the familiar wild.

The boggy smells, some fallen trees, wild blackberry canes,

and the remains of old kid-projects that might have been

meant as forts, or clubhouses, but forgotten

by some earlier generation of explorers, or by us.

Cars whizzing by on the raised highway, on the edge

of what we could choose not to hear.

Now the road passes a sports complex

on the way to extended parking for the shopping mall.

Our woods have vanished, from the Parkway

to where the drive-in was, familiar to

memory and imagination,

respite from the neat imagined lives

of our parents.

First published in Peacock Review.

Song for Cassiopea

for Kaden, marine biologist

---

As a child, you were nothing but stalk—

polyp form emerging, latching

onto nearby structures, your body

neither male nor female, still

you create your clones, proliferate

in mangrove swamps—

too warm for many, too polluted—

you are easy in that way.

Leaving polyp form, you are medusa,

telltale bell and arms but no platonic ideal, 

moons backlit in aquaria.

Among your jelly peers,

you seem confused, pulsating 

upside down, elaborate tendril arms

forever seeking.

Swimmers who know are not afraid.

Your sting is mild—not like the man o’ war,

but you hold a secret. Under stress,

you will release your stinging cells, tiny bombs

awaiting prey, distant from your rococo arms 

pretending to be coral.

My child, future scientist, picked you of all creatures

to examine. After navigating stinging waters of school, 

carrying a body mischosen by fate. Unloveable jellies—

bane of bathers, enemy of engineers, useless 

nuisance, beauty of the deep.

Now, this child, transitioned,

buries himself in science, studies

how you protect yourself,

disappearing so easily—

thinner than a contact lens.

I see you stretching back into Cambrian fossils,

doing the hard work of evolution, organizing cells 

into your chosen bodies, accomplishing 

miraculous survival.

Of the Macho

Mi hermano says he can’t change flat tires on his bicycle

anymore. His wrists too weak, can’t leverage the tire’s bead over

the rim. In high school he was the State all-around gymnastics

champion. His body flying over bars and mats.

A no ignition Johnny Blaze.

Now he places a white plastic lawn chair

in his shower. Safer, if you sit.

One summer afternoon when we were unchecked

college students, our lifeguard friend unlocked

the diving bay at the local public pool for

our romanticized athletic desires.

We bounced on the high dive, happy after some beers,

sending each other into the atmosphere.

Admiring our splashes

that exploded over the wall. Our friend

shaking her head,

our horsing around a real danger,

she claimed. And maybe,

because we both wanted to kiss her, we dared

each other in a contest of the macho. Who could

leap off the high dive board and come

closest the pool’s edge on the opposite side.

The entire pool in the shade of the early evening now, and

he launched first. His entire body embracing

the wilderness moment. A leap of redemption,

of joy, of middle-class boredom,

because they never let you howl. He landed like a perfect

arrow, un clavo, en punto, feet first, a daring splash two feet

from the edge. I swam over to him, and told him he was

crazy. He was the winner. No question, no contest.

I climbed out and watched him

glide through the water to the other wall.

He pulled his body out of the pool, the water

released him to the air. A wind of calm rushing over

the surface. The water returning to glass.

First published in Gigantic Sequins, June 2020.

Itemized Checks

There’s a coyote’s skull at Hurricane Creek / there’s a new table in your section / your life, sectioned / an hour of each day in each canine eyeball / a new set of fangs / sun-bleached / the customers / sun-bleached / coyote could run but eight hundred miles / four highways / alley smoke break / cool-running river for paws to dip / don’t stop a ruptured lung / internal wounds / essential / contained / your stress / contained / paws hit stone & entrees hit table / & you’re still moving / & you haven’t hiked in months / & breath still comes / shallowing / tumbling / a fall forward / gravity’s grace / you wonder, what kills a coyote? / you wonder, will you always be only passing through? / there’s a high turnover at this restaurant / there’s a copperhead in the water / biding time / binding time to the instant of / strike / sink / release / breathe in / release / if you call out, will they fire you? / if you die somewhere, is it finally Home?

Nostos

Birds circle:
rich entertainment
and in the middle of it
nature not quite dead.
The sun’s blade makes
one last stab
across my back.

I am leaving you,
October of my grieving—
your gray head
your orange skirt flouncing
round your ankles.
I drive east in low gear
along the unmuscled arm of Ohio
heading toward November.

And as the sun falls behind me
trees huddle to mask
disaster. Darkness, unwelcome
takes over the sky.
I thank the stars for making
a colander of night.

I look up and ahead
through heaven’s perforation.
The landscape shrivels past—
I am Orpheus in a dress
and Eurydice blind.
I drive under an overpass.
Lights strain, headlights on the bridge
gleam like the eye
in the head of an oracle.

Elegy as a Writing Instructor in State Prison

2022 Chapbook Prize Finalist

I want to know the god these men know,

pounded to life on the chapel piano.

I want to disguise myself in desert air

and follow the hymn between each keyhole.

There’s a rebirth I’m missing as I exit

the guard kiosk & accelerate. I want to know

yearnings on the yards too violent to walk,

the single ember in a cell of one

who still believes in the god I want to know.