Uber Ride, RDU Edition

Uber Ride, RDU Edition by Carol Everett Adams She’d no front teeth, but said more than any other Uber driver ever, asked me after every story, Does that make sense? Her eyes Ubering off the road as she checked mine in the rearview. We Ubered in the forests of her pitcherisk acres, Ubered on her many riding mowers, Ubered past the years her Pawpaw raised her up to hunt, so she’ll never go hungry, praise Trump, and good God, but our hearts hurt for the woman in the news who Ubered from the Blue Ridge Trail. But you know, her own cancer-passed brother once rented a convertible just so her niece and nephew could have something like a coaster ride. They perched on top of the back seat, arms up, flew and laughed and laughed, and Lord, even I could remember the sun that day,  like I Ubered down someone else’s street, does that make sense? Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz

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

Class Reunion, Homecoming

CLASS REUNION, HOMECOMING by Cathy Allman “You sure take a lot of sunrise photos,” the gray-haired woman who used to be drill team captain tells me when I scroll through my iPhone library to show grandchildren photos. No matter how much cake, or punch, or how many balloons, if not for the yearbook senior snapshots on our name tags, I wouldn’t know anyone. Did I even really know them when we graduated together in 1975? Decades of separation reunited. Captain Carry sees my shot of the river iced over, snow frosting the bare trees. “We’re in the winter of our lives,” she proclaims and sips white wine from a plastic cup. “No, this is fall, maybe even Indian summer. Is the phrase ‘Indian summer’ politically incorrect?” Photos flicker almost like a movie until I find the new baby photo. I hold my granddaughter in the chosen frame. Her open baby eyes are locked with mine. I have some knowing glance of adoration that responds to her blank curiosity, almost an unspoken prophecy of love beyond the overlap of mortal time. Yes, the days are getting shorter, but my garden is full—some tomatoes still green, some red and ripe, some rotting on the vine. The boys of summer have finished their pennant race. The World Series is here. Football is robust and populated with Swifties. Anyway, I like winter. I don’t ski. I hate being cold, but when I go back home after this reunion, back north, I will again be transformed into a child when I watch snow fall. Landscapes draped in white-cold sparkle. Leafless, tired vistas brand-new when frozen. She says, “So cute” in response to the grandchild picture and shows me her own shared albums. So goes the evening while the DJ blasts oldies. Tomorrow, I’ll return to retired status. But at this dance I’m suspended in a snow day, some surprise reprieve from the anxiety of exams—the hidden relief from the blizzard of childhood. Poetry Home Art by Ashley Hoiland

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

You Could Have Gone West, Acknowledgements

You Could Have Gone West, Acknowledgements by Kara Dorris Acknowledgementac·knowl·edg·ment  /əkˈnäləjm(ə)nt/ nounplural noun: acknowledgements    1. acceptance of the truth or existence of something.“there was no acknowledgment of the family’s trauma” 1979 was the year. The U.S. established diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal, Three Mile Island melted down, and you began attempting to conceive me, a baby girl, in the back of a ‘67 Camaro. You know, you sought balance, a future sister for a brother, one of each and all of that. The two of the 2.5 kids. Add in Lassie and all set.   At the same time in California, did Brenda Ann Spencer gather ammunition and orange juice, think all set, as she sat in her living room and opened fire on the elementary school across the street. Was she thinking to the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream? You know, the movie came out that week. And, somehow, that thought was translated into, god, I hate Mondays. Reporters. They never see subtext. She surrendered. So, what? I want to know if she longed for death. Could she not face, even at 16, the mile markers ahead? I don’t see how anyone can face the enormity, a mayfly life stretched into double infinity sign. The infinitely looping Route 66.    Don’t you ever wonder what could have been? What if Voyager I never revealed Jupiter’s rings? If the Iran Hostage Crisis never ended? What if you had gone west? If you never went to see Star Trek, climbed into that backseat, took down your pants?     ∞   Acknowledgements You could have gone west, just drove, let the road fill you up even as meth stripped you down, not that you hit the hard stuff then, just the pot and whiskey of a shotgun wedding.  You could have left your son. You hadn’t saved him from anything except oblivion of not being born.  You could have lost your shirt in Vegas. Watched Michael Jackson living off the wall. You looked like the lead singer in an ‘80s hair band, your long lank strands, your tall, lean frame.  Could have protested the canceled Mardi Gras with your mere presence.  Could have been more than a jack-in-the-box, said your name was Joe when you took that Wyoming waitress home. Could have fathered another daughter. Remember your first? You named her Eve, called her Molly. You dream of her still, how sweet and unknowable she was at the beginning, before she became known and knowing. Before she showed you in between places addicts must go.    ∞  Acknowledgementac·knowl·edg·ment  /əkˈnäləjm(ə)nt/ noun    2. the action of expressing or displaying gratitude or appreciation for something.“she received an award in acknowledgment of her work” 1979 seemed to stretch into 1980. A year of attempting to conceive. The Iran Hostage Crisis lasted 444 days. It was enough time to create new families. Was there an after? In An American in Paris, Jerry renames Lise, allows her to forget her occupation past; she pronounces his name with a French accent and suddenly his wartime is forgotten. Can there be an after disaster? Yes. Look at the trench coat, that belt you tie against rain, against time, was meant to hold grenades. And even though your hands blow shit up, you can’t pass yourself off as heavy artillery.    If Dirty Dancing had aired five years earlier, you wouldn’t have settled for him, another not-the-one. You could have carried a watermelon, not a grenade, not a kid, not the rain. Could have not lived in the trenches. But divorce shellshock lingers. What if you had headed west, been on American Airlines Flight 191 out of Chicago? Can death be a kind of life? Even as you slid into that ‘67 Camaro, as you lifted your peasant blouse, unbuckled your bra and leaned into his hands.     ∞  Acknowledgements You could have gone west, been a Vegas showgirl, a Midwest Rockette kicking thighs over chest on stage rather than over the backseat of a muscle car. It was supposed to be the time of your life. You could have scooped out the Grand Canyon with your hands, rode a donkey all the way down, bleached your hair blond, widened that streak of light and rebellion.  You could have become stewardess, flown Paris, London, Minneapolis, learned the sign language of leaving, of always assessing survival tools and nearest exits.  You could have left your son, a lesson you learned from his father. From your father’s father too. And I’m told that leaving one kid is easier than leaving two.  You could have fallen in love with shadows, the way light weaves and narrows, cul-de-sacs of shadows, shadows within shadows, of stones, in drawers.  You would have walked past me never knowing I was never born. You would have loved my shadow. You would have loved your own.    ∞   Acknowledgementac·knowl·edg·ment  /əkˈnäləjm(ə)nt/ noun    3. a letter confirming receipt of something.“I received an acknowledgment of my application”  Somewhere inside these bones, this brain, this heart, I know I wouldn’t rewind, just watch as addiction and depression climb into the backseat of a young man’s sick ride, a ‘67 Camaro. As a young woman’s shoulder pads and legwarmers sink into the floorboard, past, into the pavement, into roots of the overarching trees, ambivalent cover dripping sap against humid windows, no cover at all against the Texas heat, no Bruce Springsteen’s Cover Me, just that song, Do It To Me One More Time playing over and over again in the cassette player, until the ribbon gives out, tangles up, and rips, as all things rip, when you try to untangle.     Nonfiction Home Art by Claire Peckham

On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced

On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced. by Julia Rapp That we threw our rings in the Hudson River a moment ago.To celebrate, let’s drink alcohol that is the color of indoor pools.Tell me your last words. I will share the ways I have pierced myself.Let’s touch each other in a corner booth. Smash our bottles in the back alley.Enter a street where the people are fleas and the city is a wounded deer.It could have been our two-year anniversary, but I have been dead for years.We could start here, on a building that looks like a glass hive, and leap.No? Okay, let’s eat disappointing sushi on the hotel floor and keep talking.You want to live in a shade of purple that rolls along like a story without a plot.I want to live in a house made entirely of citrus, but San Francisco will do.Do I seem careless and radiant to you? I am trying to be a plot device.You tell me to stop kissing you like we’re married and I have just learnedthat you are dying. But darling, we are dying. So I must tell youthat I have lied— I do believe in that which endures. I (almost) do. Poetry Home Art by Mark Yale Harris

As to Wonder

Igneous lump.

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

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,