Impermanence

Impermanence by Rebecca O’Bern The bay window opens to the north.It’s foggy out. I grab the gray, knittedsweater you bought my last birthday. The dead pull us apart so easilyas if we’re the ones wrapped in tight string,transmuted into nothing in the dark. I never used to believe in dying. No needwhen an afterlife awaits, a resurrectionsuspended in clouds and dust. Death, then, becomes a cold marathon,maybe a sprint, but somethingwith end. Something measured between existing and existing again,moon to next moon. Sleep and light.Your daughter picked up your ashes today, and as our fingertips touchedI was reminded again how I didn’t callenough before our last words diminished to smoke that always tastesof home, doesn’t it, wood stove burningevening timber. I wasn’t lying about the bay window, curtains drawnand tied back, staying put, can’t help ifsmoke plumes escape to the trees. Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz

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 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 to join 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 500BC, 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 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 molluscus, meaning soft of body. We

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. “<i>My</i> 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, <i>LIL’ GULLIVER</i>. The tagline reads, <i>Like You, But Small!</i> This particular model’s label reads, <i>LIL’ VELVET GULLIVER</i>. 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, <i>Gulliver’s Travels</i> 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’ Gullivers – you

#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 camera 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

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 the false hellebore holding the 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 after Erica Reid 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 cost, that you cannot be broken, not this time.  Poetry Home Art by Emily Rankin

Transfiguration

Transfiguration by James Engelhardt The lake is only a lake because water. Time filled the valley, drowned the stream,  covered the sedges charging up the tree line.   The lake is a lake because someone hauled rock  to some line they imagined, and now a boat glides  over that imagination past the lake’s edges and inlets.   A sandhill crane angles through, tracing a path cranes have traced for millions of years. And the day is gone like a breath. The forest, too.   The lake will drain. The boat will become earth—as will we, sitting in its belly,  watching what is strange become stranger. Poetry Home Art by Kathleen Frank

Picture of Us

Picture of Us by Joshua Kulseth for Rachel Anthony 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 lobby of a hibachi steak house. After, I remember we were all over each other in 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’ worth of 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 now facing ‘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 knew what affection costs us in headache, heartache; ours no different, so it’s fitting to 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 you closer 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

The Body Center

Igneous lump.