Poetry_V18-1
Poetry Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Curation bySarah Fawn Montgomery Poem Volume 18.1 Once again, a poem about [ ] by Sagirah Shahid Poem Volume 18.1 If something is missing, don’t mention it by Angie Macri Poem Volume 18.1 Anorexia byClaire Scott Poem Volume 17.0 Recycling byRebecca Danelly Poem Volume 18.1 UBER RIDE, RDU EDITION by Carol Everett Adams Poem Volume 18.1 Class Reunion, Homecoming by Cathy Allman Poem Volume 18.1 As to Wonder by Jacqueline Hughes Simon Poem Volume 17.0 On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced by Julia Rapp Poem Volume 18.1 Palouse Hills by Jeffrey Gray Poem Volume 18.1 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 The 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
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
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,
Carp of Surprise
Carp Of Surprise by Kris Willcox 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 Oh surfacing 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
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 The 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”