Conchology
Conchology by Rebekah Chan Dear Shell, I am writing to remember that time in your car, or perhaps mine. By chance, we drove the same beige Mazda6 Sedan before we became friends after high school. It was not a unique vehicle, but rather the kind that screamed my parents’ car during what felt like the beginning of our adult life. * My early 20s are filled with the scent of cigarettes masked in pine air freshener inside your Mazda, often parked outside the grocery store complex between my house and yours. It was exactly the kind of gray plaza you’d find on every corner in the greater Toronto suburbs we grew up in. We studied at different universities, but both still lived at home with our parents who were church friends. And when we parked beside each other in those sprawling suburban parking lots, it was a homecoming of sorts, a reunion of twin-flames. In the winters, we’d have our usual Tim Horton’s parking lots to drink coffee inside your car while smoking and listening to Saves the Day and Biggie Smalls. It was too cold to smoke outside, so we’d open a tiny sliver in the window to blow smoke and ash outside. Small gusts of wind always managed to carry little white flecks of tobacco back inside. And this, this existence is how I saw our entire friendship: the two of us in a smoke-filled bubble talking about how fucked up we felt or how fucked up the world was while gazing out through salt-stained windows, and just the slightest crack to the outside world. We were always the sad girls, the only ones who noticed the small injustices of life. Like how we, the purehearted, never got what we wanted: the boy, a job, the grades, the recognition. Instead, we found shelter in each other. Me with a nose ring, you with a chin piercing. Both 5’2” and on the tanned side for Chinese girls. Both with the same ordinary beige car. Both with an unbearable frustration for a life beyond suburban parking lots. Looking back in my 40s I now see how we, or at least I, thought it was beautiful to be sad. You were truly a beautiful sad girl, one who cut herself when she felt too much or nothing at all. Those thick scars on your inner forearms, the ones that people gawked at, provoked me out of the mundanity. Living was to feel deeply. So deeply that it hurt. You were perhaps the most beautiful sad girl I’ve ever met, with distinctly chiseled cheek bones and downward-turned, deep eyes to counter my round, oval face with upward-turned, shallow-set eyes. And back then in my 20s, I also wanted to be a beautiful sad girl. * 1768 – Countries around the world were eager to study the 1769 transit of Venus. This happens when Venus (the second planet from the sun) passes between the sun and Earth (the third planet from the sun). From Earth, Venus appears as a small dot crossing the sun. The transit of Venus is a rare astronomical event that doesn’t happen for more than a century later. In 1769, the next transit would not occur until 1874. On his first voyage around the world, Captain James Cook was tasked to maneuverer the HMS Endeavour from Plymouth, Great Britain to Tahiti by June 1769 to observe this phenomenon. An affluent young biologist named Joseph Banks insisted on joining Cook to help collect plant specimens along the way. It was an expedition of a lifetime and an opportunity to calculate the distance of the earth to the sun in hopes to better understand the magnitude of the entire solar system. * After university we both work in communications, but we eventually study, discover, and become what we truly want to be. I’m a writer, and you’re a photographer. With different tools, we both try and render our worlds. Me with a keyboard and you with a camera. We both observe and capture moments. I move to Asia for the man I will marry. You move downtown, and when we can, we travel all over Southeast Asia together. In Pai, Thailand, we rent scooters. We try riding separately at first, but we have to shout while trying to navigate the roads, so we return your scooter and keep mine. This way you can just sit behind me and speak directly into my ear while we zip across the Northern Thai highlands. Together, we glid up a tall hill towards a huge pink moon hanging in the horizon. The moon had never felt so close before. You think of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” your first dance song choice with S, your first love, if you ever got back together that is. “In this moment,” you say, “I feel like everything will be okay.” We continue down the long road of the hill in silence, leaving the glowing moon behind us. But then you ask me or maybe no one, “Why can’t this just last?” * April 1769 – Finding Tahiti was no simple task. Despite Polynesians inhabiting the island since 500 BC, it had only been documented by another English explorer a year before, and thus, the exact coordinates were known. Cook crossed miles of open waters and storms to find an island only 20 miles wide. It took eight months to navigate the Endeavour to Tahiti with the only tools available: hourglasses, knotted ropes, a sextant, and an almanac to calculate the Endeavour’s position according to the stars. They reached Tahiti in April, two months before the transit of Venus, and eventually set up a small fort on the black sand beach at the end of Matavai Bay on the North Shore. From this makeshift observatory, they would study the skies and record Venus traversing across the sun. * Dear Shell, I am writing to remember, that time in your beige car, or perhaps mine. * The word “mollusk” comes from the Latin
Picture of Us
Picture of Us by Joshua Kulseth It was my birthday, and we stood—you, beautiful, youthful; me, spectacled,unable for the life of me to comb my hair correctly—in the lobbyof a hibachi steak house. After, I remember we were all over each otherin the cramped cabin of my truck, in a field, on the deck of your pool.I don’t remember you crying, though maybe you wanted to. And I wasn’t helping, being myself. We’d weather a few more months’ worthof disasters together: I took and used what you gave and after, always remorse.Rinse, repeat. It’s funny now, sort of—nothing we could make last, at least.I keep the picture as a bookmark in Auden’s Collected Poems, placed nowfacing “Lullaby,” so it’s like the two of us are reading poems together— lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm—Auden knewwhat affection costs us in headache, heartache; ours no different, so it’s fittingto leave us there, in his care. We do look happy, standing by the lobby couches,against each other bright in the camera flash, under lights,my class-ringed finger gripping your shoulder, yours my waist. The other day I saw you engaged, saw the picture of the two of youcloser than us, faces touching, smiles honest. He looks nice, and you, happy.But between us: what we said, how we suffered, it’s all still there,though better as memory (we’d have been very unhappy together);better like this: posed always in affection, in the dark of leftover words. Poetry Home Art by Ellen June Wright
Nonfiction_V17-0
Nonfiction Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Misunderstandings by Emily Hall Non-Fiction Volume 17.0 Conchology by Rebekah Chan Non-Fiction Volume 17.0 The Crash by Ashley Espinoza Non-Fiction Volume 17.0 Carrying Instructions by jane putnam perry Non-Fiction Volume 16.2 I Waited For My Turn and it Almost Killed Me by Maureen Pendras Non-Fiction Volume 16.2 Take Care by Nicole Morris Non-Fiction Volume 16.2 Something So Simple by Wendy Fontaine Non-Fiction Volume 16.1 Yellowfin by Abby McCord Non-Fiction Volume 16.1 Fears, Explained by Kayla Jessop Non-Fiction Volume 16.1
Fiction_V17-0
Fiction Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories #ratgirlsummer by Melissa Rudick Fiction Volume 17.0 Lil’ Gullivers by Kye Roper Fiction Volume 17.0 Soil and Water by Angela Townsend Fiction Volume 17.0 Cloudbursts by Scott Dorsch Fiction Volume 16.2 On The Other Side of the Wall by Andrea Bianchi Fiction Volume 16.2 In Eternal by Lauren O’Donoghue Fiction Volume 16.1 Message In a Romance Novel by Anuradha Kumar Fiction Volume 16.1
Poetry_V17-0
Poetry Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Polishing byEric Reid Poem Volume 17.0 Falling by Ashley Mae Hoiland Poem Volume 17.0 Granite Basin by Sofia Fall Poem Volume 17.0 Body Center byCindy Milwe Poem Volume 17.0 Droughtgrief byAngela Williamson Poem Volume 17.0 I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl by Jacklin Farley Poem Volume 17.0 Transfiguration by James Engelhardt Poem Volume 17.0 Picture of Us by Joshua Kulseth Poem Volume 17.0 But, like when did you know? by.Neal Allen Shipley Poem Volume 17.0 How to Lament on Tuesday at a Coffee Shop at 16:23 PSTbyJarred Mercer Poem Volume 17.0 Missing You byDante Novario Poem Volume 17.0 Impermanence by Rebecca O’Bern Poem Volume 17.0 Contusion by Emma Galloway Stephens Poem Volume 17.0 Triptych: At the Message Therapy Clinic byJessica Poli Poem Volume 17.0 A Peach Tree by E.G. Reilly Poem Volume 17.0 Girlhood Sonnet by Sophia Ivey Poem Volume 16.2 when i say my father is homesless, i mean: by Harley Chapmen Poem Volume 16.2 Gub Dog by Addy Gravatte Poem Volume 16.2 Šljivovica by Celeste Colarič-Gonzales Poem Volume 16.2 Heart by Theo LeGro Poem Volume 16.2 The More We Go The More We Don’t Know a Thing by Briel Felton Poem Volume 16.1 Away We Go by Claire Wahmanholm Poem Volume 16.1 Dew on the Sea by Claire Wahmanholm Poem Volume 16.1 The Cabinda Spouses by Landa Wo Poem Volume 16.1 And After, No One Lowered Their Flag by Matthew Williams Poem Volume 16.1 Afterbirth (fiction) by Rachel Stempel Poem Volume 16.1 Biological Speculation by Briel Felton Poem Volume 16.1 I Licked a Leaf by Ron Antonucci Poem Volume 16.1 i bleed for the first time on a toilet in Versailles by Sirka Elspass (translated by Anne-Sophie Balzer) Poem Volume 16.1 Nothing is more sad than a waning moon by Sirka Elspass (translated by Anne-Sophie Balzer) Poem Volume 16.1 I have two DNAs one belongs to my old by Roman Iorga Poem Volume 16.1
Conchology-old
Conchology by Rebekah Chan Dear Shell, I am writing to remember that time in your car, or perhaps mine. By chance, we drove the same beige Mazda6 Sedan before we became friends after high school. It was not a unique vehicle, but rather the kind that screamed my parents’ car during what felt like the beginning of our adult life. * My early 20s are filled with the scent of cigarettes masked in pine air freshener inside your Mazda, often parked outside the grocery store complex between my house and yours. It was exactly the kind of gray plaza you’d find on every corner in the greater Toronto suburbs we grew up in. We studied at different universities, but both still lived at home with our parents who were church friends. And when we parked beside each other in those sprawling suburban parking lots, it was a homecoming of sorts, a reunion of twin-flames. In the winters, we’d have our usual Tim Horton’s parking lots to drink coffee inside your car while smoking and listening to Saves the Day and Biggie Smalls. It was too cold to smoke outside, so we’d open a tiny sliver in the window to blow smoke and ash outside. Small gusts of wind always managed to carry little white flecks of tobacco back inside. And this, this existence is how I saw our entire friendship: the two of us in a smoke-filled bubble talking about how fucked up we felt or how fucked up the world was while gazing out through salt-stained windows, and just the slightest crack to the outside world. We were always the sad girls, the only ones who noticed the small injustices of life. Like how we, the purehearted, never got what we wanted: the boy, a job, the grades, the recognition. Instead, we found shelter in each other. Me with a nose ring, you with a chin piercing. Both 5’2” and on the tanned side for Chinese girls. Both with the same ordinary beige car. Both with an unbearable frustration for a life beyond suburban parking lots. Looking back in my 40s I now see how we, or at least I, thought it was beautiful to be sad. You were truly a beautiful sad girl, one who cut herself when she felt too much or nothing at all. Those thick scars on your inner forearms, the ones that people gawked at, provoked me out of the mundanity. Living was to feel deeply. So deeply that it hurt. You were perhaps the most beautiful sad girl I’ve ever met, with distinctly chiseled cheek bones and downward-turned, deep eyes to counter my round, oval face with upward-turned, shallow-set eyes. And back then in my 20s, I also wanted to be a beautiful sad girl. * 1768 – Countries around the world were eager to study the 1769 transit of Venus. This happens when Venus (the second planet from the sun) passes between the sun and Earth (the third planet from the sun). From Earth, Venus appears as a small dot crossing the sun. The transit of Venus is a rare astronomical event that doesn’t happen for more than a century later. In 1769, the next transit would not occur until 1874. On his first voyage around the world, Captain James Cook was tasked to maneuverer the HMS Endeavour from Plymouth, Great Britain to Tahiti by June 1769 to observe this phenomenon. An affluent young biologist named Joseph Banks insisted on joining Cook to help collect plant specimens along the way. It was an expedition of a lifetime and an opportunity to calculate the distance of the earth to the sun in hopes to better understand the magnitude of the entire solar system. * After university we both work in communications, but we eventually study, discover, and become what we truly want to be. I’m a writer, and you’re a photographer. With different tools, we both try and render our worlds. Me with a keyboard and you with a camera. We both observe and capture moments. I move to Asia for the man I will marry. You move downtown, and when we can, we travel all over Southeast Asia together. In Pai, Thailand, we rent scooters. We try riding separately at first, but we have to shout while trying to navigate the roads, so we return your scooter and keep mine. This way you can just sit behind me and speak directly into my ear while we zip across the Northern Thai highlands. Together, we glid up a tall hill towards a huge pink moon hanging in the horizon. The moon had never felt so close before. You think of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” your first dance song choice with S, your first love, if you ever got back together that is. “In this moment,” you say, “I feel like everything will be okay.” We continue down the long road of the hill in silence, leaving the glowing moon behind us. But then you ask me or maybe no one, “Why can’t this just last?” * April 1769 – Finding Tahiti was no simple task. Despite Polynesians inhabiting the island since 500 BC, it had only been documented by another English explorer a year before, and thus, the exact coordinates were known. Cook crossed miles of open waters and storms to find an island only 20 miles wide. It took eight months to navigate the Endeavour to Tahiti with the only tools available: hourglasses, knotted ropes, a sextant, and an almanac to calculate the Endeavour’s position according to the stars. They reached Tahiti in April, two months before the transit of Venus, and eventually set up a small fort on the black sand beach at the end of Matavai Bay on the North Shore. From this makeshift observatory, they would study the skies and record Venus traversing across the sun. * Dear Shell, I am writing to remember, that time in your beige car, or perhaps mine. * The word “mollusk”
The Crash
The Crash by Ashley Espinoza Inspired by Aftermath by Elane Johnson After my car slid on the ice and another car hit me. After you had said you weren’t sure you wanted to be a father. After I googled if my seven-week-old fetus could die during a low impact car accident. After I searched and searched every website for an answer. After I found out that, while pregnant, I shouldn’t go on roller coasters or horseback rides, and I shouldn’t be in a car accident either, but no websites would tell me an answer for a 15 mph car crash. After I called to ask if you had made your decision. After I learned the due date was September first. After you didn’t answer the phone, but you did answer the text– you said you hated to say it, but you couldn’t do it. After you never called ever again. After the hospital staff asked if I was sure there wasn’t a name I could put under the father section of the birth certificate. After I cried because my daughter does not have a father. After no one held me. After no one but me held my daughter when she cried in the middle of the night. After I saw you once and hid from you. After I saw your truck as I drove down the highway. After I still look for your truck even though I know you no longer drive that one. After I looked you up on Facebook. After I still look you up and stalk every post looking for an answer. After I am still single six years later and I see you on Bumble looking for something casual. After I cried for years and years and years over you. After I stopped wondering if you would ever care for my daughter. After I drove down your street to see if you still lived there, even though I would have no way of knowing that answer. After I stopped wondering if you would call and change your mind. After my daughter is all grown and probably looks like you. After she asks me to caress her arms in the same way you used to. After she looks right at me and says, “Anyway I don’t even want a dad.” Home Nonfiction Home Art by Dominick Williams
I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl
I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl by Jacklin Farley I’ve forgotten what it’s liketo be real. Betweenmeals, I pinch up belly fat, chubbybunny marshmallow bitessandwiched by my suspiciousfingertips. I then attempt to conjuremetabolism like a monsoon of ChinaSlim Tea and sugar-freeHaribo gummy bears throughmy blood. So it goesfor those of us past the acceptable agefor playing Bloody Maryand comparing thigh gapsat sleepovers. As I get older, I realizeit takes velocity to existin organic form, especiallymine. One minute, my lovelanguage is sophisticated curve, peachslice drippingsweet with juice. The next, it’s an aspirin tabletdropped into a liter-sized Pepsibottle with the cap screwedshut, transparent jugularbulging with carbonated excess seekingevaporative exodus in the snack aisleof your local Walgreens. It’s on the daysI feel the emptiestthat I want to explodethe most, feel like I am runningthrough a Reese’s peanut buttercup fieldencased by green Jell-Osalad, that I want someone to unbucklemy ankle straps and call me”kitten” despite the factI haven’t been teacup-sized since I was fourteen, despitemy repressedscheming to eventually fit my fatass back into Paris Hilton’s handbag. But ifI can’t have hipdips, whipped creamon my titties, or armpit jiggle ready to embrace the lipsof a saxophoneplayer, do I even wantthis life? I must be eating more to have such energyto philosophize,to embrace living like a back alleyduct tape Brazilian: throbbingand shameless, fleshyand blushed down to the bonein places no one else can see. It’s painful, butat least I can feelmore than nerve damagein my hands, the urge to hold my coffeecup in a compactor-tightgrip to register even a Celsiusof warmth. Call it my own methodfor moderation, aftermathof disorder. Call it crèmebrûléeing the wound after it curdles. As longas you sing, paradoxof my digestive tract. For I know one dayI will cease to be cute. For all I know, todayis that daypouring into my palmsover my belt line, spilled pitcherof milkshake, too much lovein my handles. The world can tell meI am too oldto be silly or fat. It won’t stop mefrom molting, coming backin a different skin. For I thinkI am rather too young to be dead. Poetry Home Art by Winslow Schmelling
Lil’ Gullivers
Lil’ Gullivers by Kye Roper “The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that… they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.” – Paulo Freire “They talk. They think. They’re ready for adventure: Introducing Lil’ Gullivers – Playtime’s never been so alive!” – AstroGo, Inc.® “HEY.” A man steps out of his suburban home at the cul-de-sac end, wearing the contemporary attire one might expect a middle-aged member of the bougie class to wear on a casual Saturday morning (old teambuilding t-shirt from work, khaki shorts). He is pissed. The USPS driver is hustling halfway back across the lawn when he halts mid-step, startled at the yelling, and swivels around. At the threshold, the homeowner puts on his best power stance – though little more than a minor landed gentry to the world, while on his lawn, inside his doorstep, he is secret King of his single-family detached home. Also, he’s been tracking this package all morning. “Hold on,” the man yells. “I’m right here.” The delivery man crosses back. “Just need you to sign here, please.” The man impatiently scribbles something resembling a child’s crude line graph atop the signature line. “You didn’t even ring the doorbell.” “And here, please.” The man impatiently scribbles again. “I was waiting right inside. You didn’t even bother ringing the doorbell.” The delivery man scrunches his face. “I did ring the doorbell,” which is true. “I rang it several times,” which is not true. But also, screw this guy. He doesn’t know his ‘customers’ – who are only sometimes right, but in this case a right asshole – and likewise doesn’t know the man had just prior been locked away in the basement when he arrived. Doesn’t matter. He is constantly delivering packages to this address, packages of identical dimensions, same company, multiple times a month, and has come to feel mild apprehension pulling up at this particular curb due to exactly this sort of interaction. He figures the guy’s got an online shopping problem. Sees it a lot. 9-to-5ers burying themselves under credit card debt because damn, is it satisfying, the click of snagging some unneeded new thing, the tiny hits of endorphin bursts that one hopes in their sum will add up to some greater happiness, maybe even equal to the sort of halfway decent vacation they wish they had the time and/or cash to afford. A vacation, those bite-sized luxury purchases – it’s never really about the receiving. The real hit’s in the waiting, the jitters of expectation for alleviating, maybe even curing the malaise of it all. The problem with next-day delivery is that there is no waiting. That’s why the clicks keep clicking unceasingly. It’s kind of sad. Or would be, but again, screw this guy. “Here you are, sir,” the delivery man intones. The man gives no reply. He grabs the package. Kicks the door shut behind him. His right hand is turning the basement knob when a woman, his wife, calls down from the upstairs study. “Jaaaaaassooooon.” “Yes?” He answers, annoyance in his voice. “Was that the doorbell?” “No, he didn’t even ring the doorbell.” “Who is he?” “Nobody. Nobody rang the doorbell. It was the wrong number.” “What wrong number?” “Wrong house number, I don’t know.” “Jason. You didn’t order another of those creepy things, did you?” “No,” tearing the tape off with his teeth, “of course not.” “We’ve talked about this.” Under his breath, half-muffled since the tape’s proving quite hard to tear off, “feels like all we ever damn talk about.” “If you’re wasting more of our money on those things then I swear, I’m not kidding, we’re returning it.” “Our money?” He scoffs to no one but himself, descending the basement stairs. “My money.” In the inner circle of the inner sanctuary of the basement, he sets the contents on the table. It’s a toy. No, an action figure. No, even worse: A collectible. The clear case is a classic plastic display box, the top of which reads, LIL’ GULLIVER. The tagline reads, Like You, But Small! This particular model’s label reads, LIL’ VELVET GULLIVER. Jason removes the figure and positions him standing up atop the table. Lil’ Velvet Gulliver is a 10-inch-tall plastic figure, wearing an early 18th century, Georgian era style of dress. Knee-length, double-breasted coat with fitted silhouette, accentuated by decorative buttons; high-collared shirt and thigh-high breeches, lots of lace; delicate stockings held by garters of elastic fabric. Everything, from the cravat tied around its neck down to its buckled shoes, is made of purple velvet. Eggplant purple. Beautiful, sensual, eggplant purple. Lil’ Velvet Gulliver blinks its tiny eyes three times and cranes its neck up at the moon-faced giant. Its voice is high-pitched and squeaky as befitting a lil’ figure. “Why hey there big buddy.” “Welcome,” Jason says. “My name is Jason.” Lil’ Velvet Gulliver smiles a big smile. “Hi Jason, nice to meet ya… Don’t know who I am.” “What you are.” “Don’t know that either,” it says, its carefree smile still plastered on. “No, I’m saying you’re a what. I purchased you off ToyBuy.” Shrugging amicably, “If you say so.” “You’re a Gulliver.” “Gull-ehh-ver,” sounding out each syllable as if committing it to memory. “Correct. More specifically, you are a Lil’ Velvet Gulliver.” “That sounds fun.” Jason shakes his head. “It’s a literary reference.” “Oh wow, I’m a literary reference.” Lil’ Velvet Gulliver scratches its head with a pause. “I can’t read.” “Of course you can’t. In short, Gulliver’s Travels was a satirical travelogue published by the Irish author Jonathan Swift in 1726, featuring Lemuel Gulliver, a fictional surgeon also trained in navigation and mathematics, who visits strange and fantastical lands on several voyages after his ships are destroyed, blown off course, and attacked by pirates.” “Sounds like our Gulliver shoulda stopped getting on ships.” “Well, he wasn’t a real person. Like you.” “Oh.” “You see, Lil’
But like, when did you know?
But like, when did you know? by Neal Allen Shipley after torrin a. greathouse i When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class. No one else home, we still closed the door and blue light radiated from a screen hardly larger than a Gameboy. We felt dangerous, watching stolen porn: Ragged breathing. No talking. No eye contact. We didn’t do anything – just shifted, uncomfortable, legs twitching to the pulse of an unfamiliar dance. Later, they talked about imagining themselves the man. That’s when I knew there was something different: Knew I should have been watching the woman cupping her breasts, tossing her hair back, moaning; knew she was beautiful, if not a little campy; knew my legs should have twitched for her. The cameraman seemed to know: Zooming in close on the man’s face so I could watch the corner of his lips curl while he whispered, fuck yeah; panned down his chest and arms (tan, smooth, just a little muscle), and still downward across taut abs; only stopping to come even closer to his dick. I convinced myself I was only looking to compare my own. I watched straight porn for a long time; the women usually seemed to have a great time with men, who I told myself I wasn’t looking at when they whispered fuck yeah to me from the blue light. Later: Search terms like just men lead me to videos that made more sense. ii When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class. No one else home, we still closed the door and blue light radiated from a screen hardly larger than a Gameboy. We felt dangerous, watching stolen porn: Ragged breathing. No talking. No of an unfamiliar dance. Later, they talked about imagining themselves the man. That’s when I knew there was something different: Knew I should have been watching the woman cupping my legs should have twitched for her. The cameraman seemed to know: Zooming in close on the man’s face so I could watch the corner of his lips curl while he whispered, fuck yeah; panned down his chest and arms (tan, smooth, just a little muscle), and still downward across taut abs; only stopping to come even closer to his dick. I convinced myself I was only looking to compare my own. I watched straight porn for a long time; the women usually seemed to have a great time with men, who I told myself I wasn’t looking at when they whispered fuck yeah to me from the blue light. Later: Search terms like just men lead me to videos that made more sense. iii When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class. No one else home, we still closed the door and blue light radiated from a screen hardly larger I knew there was something different: Knew I should have been watching the woman cupping my legs should have twitched for her. The cameraman seemed to know: Zooming in close on the man’s face so I could watch the corner of his lips curl while he whispered, fuck yeah; abs; only stopping to come even closer to his dick. I convinced myself I was only looking from the blue light. iv When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class. No one else we still closed the door and blue radiated from a screen hardly something different: on the man’s face so I could watch the corner of his lips curl while he whispered, fuck yeah Poetry Home Art by Nick Hurlbut.