Bus 142

Bus 142 by Anu Khosla A burly man approximately the size of a yeti in a jacket the color of caution tape made a ski cut across the convex roller. He applied the full weight of himself to his ski edge in order to make a line in the snow, releasing a mini avalanche below us. We watched that slab of white wall whumpf its way down like fresh icing sliding right off a still-hot cake. Buddied up for this lap, we locked eyes and clinked our poles like champagne glasses. Go time. Like that famous line from Albert Camus: “In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.” But for me the summer wasn’t exactly within. Skiing was the summer; it was external. I liked that menthol burn at the top of the throat that arises from cold air quickly consumed. I liked that striated pulse of the quads. It made me feel things: competent, at ease, alive. Happy, even. I’ve wanted to be an adventurer, and to be recognized as an adventurer: one of the brave ones who carries pain like a pack to the ends of the earth and comes back to tell the story.  Camus also wrote that “When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardor and that illumination.” I have had the good luck to chase down that ardor and illumination of the outdoors like a dragon. “Forsaking beauty and the sensual happiness attached to it,” Camus continues, “exclusively serving misfortune, calls for a nobility I lack. But, after all, nothing is true that forces one to exclude.”  Somehow, people didn’t want to see me the way I wanted to be seen. There was some barrier to it. Something physical stood in the way.  * Chris McCandless went into the wild and found himself a shelter structure. It was an abandoned bus, Bus 142, found along the Stampede Trail, near Denali National Park. Bus 142 is very similar in shape to Miss Frizzle’s Magic School Bus. It is white on top, and looks to have been previously yellow towards the bottom, but is now painted over in a mossy green. Just above the windows it says “142” in a stylish sans serif, and below it reads “FAIRBANKS CITY TRANSIT SYSTEM”.  Chris McCandless went into the wild. The wild was an old bus that had originated in a municipal transit system. It originated in a history that contained names like Benz and Daimler and Maybach and Ford. The wild was on the edge of a national park that was established in 1917. Denali was number 12 in a line of national parks, an American idea –– “America’s Best Idea” –– first conceived in 1872.  Chris McCandless was found dead in Bus 142 in September of 1992. He was found alongside his journal, whose last entry, tagged Day 102, read: “BEAUTIFUL BLUE BERRIES.”    Jon Krakauer wrote about Chris McCandless in his 1996 classic Into the Wild. Sean Penn directed a 2007 film adaption of the book starring Emile Hirsch. Guys like Krakauer –– and Penn, I suppose ––get to decide what a true and authentically rugged –– always rugged –– outdoorsman looks like.  Thanks to Krakauer, McCandless remains, in the collective imagination, as exemplar bar none of an outdoors person. Meanwhile, Krakauer remains the absolute epitome of outdoor writer. Never mind that McCandless didn’t make it out alive. Never mind that Krakauer had to revise his facts, again and again and maybe again.  The shelter was a bus, not a cave. It was the crumbs of civilization, not the treasure of the untamed.  * Gear is a kind of treasure, and in many corners of the outdoors having old gear is a point of pride. The most embarrassing thing you can bring to the trail (or the crag, or the line up, or the river) is a brand new piece of equipment free of any scratch or blemish. New gear indicates unused gear, which can indicate a poser who has the money to buy the thing but not the marks of experience. The new gear becomes synecdoche, and the person holding it is assumed to navigate no farther than the REI parking lot.  Old gear is an indication that something has been used. The patina of a piece of old gear becomes proof of someone’s time spent doing an activity –– the ultimate source of authenticity in the outdoors. The seams of a wetsuit can only rip and the edges of a climbing shoe can only be rounded through use. Never mind that gear can be bought used by anybody at all. * When I was 11, I traveled to Connecticut for the first time. Every kid I met there asked, “You’re from California? Do you surf?” One would think that you can’t surf in Connecticut, but actually you can, sometimes. That technicality had no relevance to these kids because they lived inland, and they had no access to the shore. They also lacked access to any profound concept of California. They could not imagine that the Northern California coastline is shockingly frigid and unfriendly. I do not mean “shockingly” metaphorically. Each time I dip even a fingertip into the ocean here my body goes into a light shock. The Connecticut kids could not imagine that there was a version of Californian culture that did not encourage scraggly brown girls to grab a board and paddle out.  Someone painted them a picture of California, but that place they imagine is myth. I must live in the real place.  * In the summer of 2023, I am a brown girl entering the De Young Museum in San Francisco to see an exhibit on the works of Ansel Adams. Alongside his prints are more recent photographs from artists who came after him, printing works in conversation with Adams’ pieces.  One of those artists is Binh Danh, an

Curation

Curation by Sarah Fawn Montgomery I’ve dusted the relics for display, careful to curate a collection of the self. Follow the docent past the great hall: weapons, splattered canvas, coins and ironic urinals, world leaders made of marble before entering an exhibit of my body and best mistakes—scars and sex with strangers, vertebra resisting alignment, spirit claiming indifferent cities. The cabinet of regret outsizes the case of joys but not the shelves of grief carefully catalogued— assault, sexual; disability, invisible; father, deceased; violence, domestic; womb, barren. An intern wipes clean the glass for zero dollars an hour though the gift shop sells my teeth, the brittle fingernails plucked after death for less than a bad cup of coffee. Preservation isn’t easy, so forgive the arbitrary arrangement of my underwear and grudges, resentments next to a broken childhood doll, private matters made public, persona a requirement for audience. I tried to present the story of my survival but museums only display what is already lost, curate what has ceased to exist. Fiction Home Art by Michael Walrond

Once again, a poem about [ ]

Once again, a poem about [    ] by Sagirah Shahid In this returning emergency, in this crisisI give you love poemscaught between my teeth. What’s new about the little liars our lives have become?I need you to taste this day with me,to live it out with gusto, even though we both knowwe’re going to die eventually. You can’t teach a poet new tricks.I lattice my fingers into yoursand let my eyes lap up the moonwith you by my side. We are both shiny and larger than lifeon the inside. We are both cratered and citylesson the inside. No one inhabits usexcept for the lightwhich we reflect backto the people who keepprecise distance. As if to avoidthe growing shadowwhich comes backas much as it leaves us. We are invisible now.We are visible. We are the smallestsliver of universe.We are almost whole. Fiction Home Art by Kelley Hudson

If something is missing, don’t mention it,

If something is missing, don’t mention it, by Angie Macri husband, parent, job, mind, limb, businesses downtown, the lots where sidewalks led to deadends where nice old houses once had been. One hot night, two girls walked down one, then turned to look at the street as it must have been seen from the porch back then. Oh we shouldn’t do this, the older said, it feels strange, and so they didn’t again. Streetlights, headlights caught in the pebbles in the concrete like lights in animals’ eyes, in their eyes as they walked home. Permissible: to speak of rain so long gone fields burned where they stood around the town. Because all knew, rain would return, for sure, sooner or later. Poetry Home Art by Bryan Prince

Snowgators

Snowgators by Patrick Hueller “As far as I’m concerned,” Jay says, “this is humanity’s last chance. Its very redeemability is on the line.” He lifts an armful of snow and dumps it on a pile that is going to be the alligator’s head. Nathan isn’t paying attention to him. He’s back closer to the gator’s haunches, on his knees, gently dusting loose snow from its flank. His ear is right up next to the snow sculpture, like he’s checking for breathing. “Redeemability?” It’s Clint who says this. Clint, who’s new to this small group. Clint, who makes the group three instead of two—but just barely: He’s not a very active member. Mostly, he just stands there, stiff-legged and towering. He isn’t helping the other two build the snowgator. In fact, he hasn’t even taken his hands out of the pockets of his winter jacket. “Yeah,” Jay says, turning to Clint as if he’d forgotten all about him, but nonetheless grateful to have a responsive audience. “My faith in the capacity for human goodness is at stake.” He bends down for another armful of snow, dropping it with a splat on the same pile as before. “If they destroy this one too, the jury will no longer be able to hold its tongue. Evil will have once and for all conquered all that is warm and fuzzy. Case. Fucking. Closed.” Unlike Nathan, who ignores Jay entirely and continues gently sanding away some snow with a gloved hand, Clint nods and smiles. He wants Jay to know that he has his full attention.   Nathan stands up to inspect the section he’s been working on. Jay stands next to him. “What do you think?” he says, clapping Nathan on the shoulder. “Should we give him plates on his back like a dinosaur?” Nathan doesn’t hesitate. “Alligators don’t have plates.” “How many times do I have to tell you? This isn’t an alligator. It’s a snowgator. And snowgators totally have plates.” When Nathan doesn’t seem impressed, Jay turns to Clint. “Isn’t that right, dude?” he asks, because by now he knows Clint will agree with whatever he says.  Actually, that’s pretty much all he knows about his new roommate. He doesn’t know why Clint transferred. Or what Clint plans on studying. Or what Clint typically does with his free time. He certainly doesn’t know that currently, behind the fabric of his winter jacket, Clint is clutching a carving knife. Clint wasn’t always tall or skinny. Along with being the sort of spacey kid who frequently forgot his deodorant and his shoes, who routinely spent the day stinking and clumping around somehow-unashamedly in winter boots, he was pudgy and paradoxically puny. Vertically challenged enough to fit in lockers. Infinitesimal enough to get weighted down by his own backpack. Shrimpy enough that he couldn’t carry his textbooks under his arms. (Instead, he had to hold the books in front of him, tilted toward his soft chest.) He didn’t ever actually get stuffed in a locker—as far as he could tell, that was mythical bullying behavior—but sometimes, back then, he wished he did. A few seconds of brutality, followed by dark isolation: it seemed preferable to the constant and public brutality he actually faced in school. In the hallways, the other boys knocked his books out of his arms and then scattered, tossing the books in various trashcans and recycling bins for him to retrieve one by one. In class, they sat behind him and pushed his desk into the middle of the room with their feet. His teachers would tell the boys to knock it off—but that was usually all they’d do, at least in part because Clint would laugh off the treatment he received as though he were in on the joke. What else could he do? Nothing, according to his parents. When the boys took and cracked his graphing calculator, his parents bought him a new one. When the boys spread a rumor, in seventh grade, that they found him masturbating in the bathroom, his parents told him to . . . well, they didn’t tell him anything, because Clint didn’t mention the rumor. For one thing, he didn’t know exactly what masturbating was—a fact that was perhaps more embarrassing than the rumor itself. He could tell, by the ways the boys talked about it, that the act was somehow illicit, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t been doing anything other than peeing, but he was also just barely savvy enough to know that admitting ignorance would only make matters worse. At best, it would lead to him asking more and more questions, the final and most basic one being: why does everyone hate me? And by everyone, he meant everyone. For years his parents had encouraged him to try hanging out with these boys, then those ones over there, then . . . . They’d bought him baseball cards and Magic cards; they’d given him manga and motorcycle magazines. Several times, for his birthday and Christmas, they re-did his whole wardrobe. For his part, Clint was as committed to figuring out where he fit in as they were. But nothing ever worked. When students sang along to songs on the bus to school, he’d write down the lyrics so frantically that unbeknownst to him he was making a scene; after he’d Googled the lyrics at home, after he’d listened to it over and over again and gotten all the words completely memorized, he’d wait with twitchy anxiety for the song to finally play on the bus radio again. When it did, he’d sing along too aggressively, too perfectly, too . . . something . . . while the other kids watched in dismay and gave each other looks. So, yeah: at some point it became official. They all hated him, and there was nothing he could do about it. He understood, at some level, that this was his fault, that the problem, clearly, was Clint himself. But—more devastatingly—he also understood, contradictorily

Carp of Surprise

Carp Of Surprise by Kris Wilcox When the nursing unit director calls to say that his father has died during the night, he is lifted without warning from coffee and newspaper into stinging, new air. She gives condolences and details: time of death (four, clocked by an aid), the hour the mortuary man will come (nine, unless later). While she speaks his mouth hangs open like—he can’t help it—a hooked fish. A student of his once wrote a story about a man who, after a shock, stood “gaping like a carp,” and whether it was the student (difficult) or the story (not bad) he’s never escaped the connection. It lives in him, a lipless Ohsurfacing in moments of surprise. She asks if he wants to leave the body. What? Does he want his father’s body left in the room. He works his mouth, No. If the mortuary is coming, let him be moved. Good, she says, and he knows it’s the right answer. She hurries on: death certificate, lease, belongings. No need to respond now, she says, and he doesn’t. When they fished—he and his father—they dropped their catch on a line in the shallows, where the silver bodies twisted and flashed. Sir? His head swivels as if she’s caught him by the jaw. Yes, he’ll meet them at the mortuary. Return later for paperwork. She hangs up and he is released. He taps the steering wheel on the way to the mortuary, trying to recall where they camped those summers ago. And were they rainbows or browns? Mouthfuls of bones. He complimented his student on that image of the man-carp. Memorable! (Had he known). Down the road, the mortuary sign. Traffic sweeps him on. Mouth open, body slit. The stunned, wet contents fall away: his father’s voice, the student’s name. But that fish. That goddamned fish will live forever. Fiction Home Art by Bryan Price

#ratgirlsummer

#ratgirlsummer by Melissa Rudick We sit on the toilet, our inside-pants around our ankles. We sprawl on IKEA couches covered in weighted blankets. We rot in our beds, having laid down for just a minute many minutes ago. Blue light reflects in our eyes. Our thumbs in constant motion, swiping up again and again. The thrum of the air conditioner plays in the background. Outside, cars honk at jaywalking pedestrians. Inside, a smoke detector beeps again, reminding us we better change that battery later.  We are bored and dissatisfied and we want something different. We have been let down. We believed if we just did what was expected of us, if we stayed nice, if we shrunk down, if we performed happiness, that happiness itself would find us. We would be content, finally. Now, we are wising up. It’s a rigged system, we tell each other. There’s another way, we say.  We look into the front-facing cameras on our phones. We talk to our mirrored selves. We proclaim that there will be a vibe shift. There will be no more Hot Girls, Chill Girls, Not Like Other Girls Girls. We will have a new energy, what we dub B.R.E.- Big Rodent Energy. It is #ratgirlsummer, we say. We heart each other’s posts. We comment in all caps. We write YES. We write LOVE THIS SO MUCH. We write THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.  We find each other.  We see clips of a rat carrying a giant slice of pizza down the subway stairs. We think how we could really go for a giant slice of pizza. We leave our homes, dressed to please ourselves. We wear shorts, some of us for the first time since childhood. Our thighs spill out. We feel the hot night air on our legs. Legs that are pale or hairy or dimpled. We are too skinny and too fat. We are wild and unwanted and beautiful. When we see each other on the streets, gulping hot cheese as we scamper by, we smile big toothy grins.  “Crush that slice!” we shout. “Your hair is EVERYTHING!” we reply.  We find treasures on our excursions—shiny things, precious things. We collect them and bring them home to surround us. An incomplete inventory of our hoard is as follows: friendship bracelets, gel pens, trading cards of BTS members, water bottles, books, yarn, iPods, and earrings that dangle and sparkle. Some of us gather stuffed animals and pile them high on our beds. One of us has a penchant for outer space, spending hours each day in the sourcing and acquisition of cosmos-related paraphernalia. We are unapologetic in our enthusiasm for these things. There is no cringe in a #ratgirlsummer.  You scrunch up your faces and ask, “but why a rat?”  The girlies that get it get it and those of you that don’t, don’t. How could we explain that to have a #ratgirlsummer means to have freedom from caring how the world sees us and to do what we want to do, when we want to do it?  We quote Mary Oliver and say, “We choose to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves.” “But a rat?” you ask again. “A filthy, disgusting rat?” We stop talking. You prefer us as kittens or bunnies, to be held in your hands, petted, cooed over, and contained. There is no point in the explaining, we know. You are incapable of understanding. Only we can hold space for this.  We learn that a group of rats is called a mischief and we decide right then and there to host a mischief. That night we light up the group chat. There are details to figure out, plans to make. Initially, there is division over where to hold it. We consider whether the venue ought to align with our values. Finding none that do, we focus on other matters. Margaritas, for example.  Let’s not forget the apps, we write.  We would NEVER, we reply.  We send images of rats in sunglasses. Rats on skateboards. Rats in tutus. We laugh react to each one.  YESSSS, we write. LET’S CAUSE MAYHEM. We arrive as individuals still getting used to being part of a group, a collective, a community. In each other’s company we feel at ease and we think this is how we were meant to live- together, not alone. We are young and old, mostly female but not only. All are welcome, we say, being a rat girl is more about attitude than it is about gender. We dance and drink our margaritas. We gnaw loaded potato skins and we roar with laughter. The servers give us looks and sigh as they clear our dishes. We take turns connecting our phones to the bluetooth speaker, selecting songs that make us move, make us sing from our bellies. You poke your heads in the door to see who is causing this ruckus. You leave quickly upon seeing us intertwined and bound together, an undulating and ecstatic dancing mass. We are UNBOTHERED, we shout. We are happy, at last.  We make our way home, piled into taxis. We look out for each other. No rat girl left behind, we cry. Once home we don’t bother with changing out of our clothes. We make a nest of our covers and we fall asleep, quickly for once. It is a deep sleep.  As we awake in the morning from easy dreams we find ourselves transformed in our beds into gigantic rats. We look at the pink of our tails curled around our bodies, the tips reaching our faces. We are covered in brown fur, we stroke it with our fingertips. We giggle at our softness. We notice our thumbs are gone. We don’t miss them. We are not alarmed nor surprised by this change in our forms. We are not Gregor Samsa. We do not feel shame about who we are. We know we are us, made better. We sit up and our whiskers

Granite Basin

Granite Basin by Sofia Fall I used to run up there on Perseverance Trail when I lived in the apartment  on top of Gold Street where it met Basin  Road and all I had to do all day was run or walk for miles in the rain and try to think of nothing except false hellebore holding droplets on its pleated leaves in perfect viscous spheres. It was early in June. The only  person I knew in the whole drenched town had taught me that false hellebore  was poisonous to humans. It causes  the heart to slow, induces vertigo. I couldn’t  stop picturing how it would feel to chew the leaves to stringy pulp and watch  the mountains go blurry and succumb to the mists that always enveloped them,  until it was all dizzy and invisible, me and the narrow trail above the gorge through the illuminated valley. I wanted my heart to go so slow no creature  could discern its beating. Instead, I just kept running, tried to make it every day all the way to the washout without stopping, ran faster so the hellebore became so smeared and green in my peripheral vision it glowed. I hated having to live every moment in real time, always seeing with utter clarity. I hated letting every single leaf of that abundant verdant poison go. Only the bears ate it.    Poetry Home Art by Robin Young

Polishing

Polishing by Erica Reid after Laura Read I store recordings of birdsong on my phone.  I don’t know which birds, or how to learn,  or if it’s important to know. I need to earn prizes for things, always have. My mother called me an apple polisher & she was right.  Who gives someone a dirty apple? I do  everything the right way, & when I can’t  I cry. On my phone you can listen to birds from 2016, they may not even be alive anymore. Did they say all they needed to say? Would they be proud of me,  replaying their chittering with a studious expression? My mother was not proud  that I wanted the world to love me, that I  craved little head-pats from strangers & made homework for myself, then  completed it. Cemeteries are great places to overhear birds. Often I read wives’ names  from the headstones, in case no one else  has spoken them aloud in a while. I polish the marble lambs on baby graves with my  sleeves. See how good I can be? See what doesn’t bother me? It is time I knew these birds: where do they sleep, do they learn  faces, do they play favorites? Which ones drill holes, which ones like apples, which ones are red? Word by word I’ll learn their language,  the kind things they might have said. Poetry Home Art by Marina Leigh

Falling

Falling by Ashley Hoiland Last night my daughter came to the side of the bed with a nightmare still in her eyelids. As I slid her body, like a velvet puppy, under the sheets next to me, she said the dream was about a war.  And I see how the soft folds of her six-year-old brain  could get there.  The next morning, she fell on her scooter and told me after, “I fell violently to the ground.” And is there another way to fall?  When the cottonwood tree in the backyard had to come down, five men pulling with a rope guided her body, 80 feet of it,  piece by piece, back to the earth.  The whole house shook when each section hit the sloping summer grass.  I wondered if the tree would forgive me when I took down the fence and allowed the men into the yard to take her. And today, on a Wednesday morning,  when my sister and her daughter went to get the breakfast check at Denny’s, an older woman in a booth alone had already paid for it. So, to my own daughter going forward, some falls are violent,  and sometimes a stranger catches you believing, at all costs, that you cannot be broken, not this time. Poetry Home Art by Emily Rankin