angel is a centerfoldStacy Parker Le Melle

asian in a redneck townDiana Keren Lee

every time they ask if we'll rebuildHaley Sledge

from the immanent fieldMichael Martin Shea

from the woodlandsCate Peebles

making love with a boston fernLauren Aimee Curtis

system of safetyNora Toomey

Angel Is a Centerfold

Stacy Parker le Melle

In 1982, Nana takes me to Oakland Mall in Madison Heights, my working class suburb north of Detroit, Michigan. Sometimes I walk from my family’s apartment to this mall with a babysitter, crossing busy 14 Mile Road with just enough change to buy a 45 single. But my grandmother drives us today. She has offered to buy me not just a 45 but an LP.

I walk through Harmony House to the back to scan the rows of Top 40 45s displayed across the wall. Then I flip through the rock albums, alpha order. Fingers on slick plastic-covered squares, I anticipate the chance to unwrap a new album carefully so as not to scratch the cover, for that is to be treasured, too. When I remember what I want is popular and should be on full display above the racks, I see it: Freeze Frame. The J. Geils Band.

Nana gave me the money already and I take my album to the cash register up front. The young men ringing sales will be the same men who smile and flirt with me when I’m older. When I’m the age they sing about in songs: sixteen, seventeen. But also when I’m fifteen, fourteen, thirteen. I will be on a first name basis with the men because they kept those jobs for years, a kind of prestige job that won’t pay much, but has importance because it is music, even if this is still a corporate shop and not an independent. When my purchase is placed in a bag and handed to me, I meet my Nana outside, in the aisle of this atrium wing of the mall.

What did you get? I pull out the record to show her. She looks pleased for me. She is reading the song list. She stops on “Centerfold.” Centerfold? Do you know what a centerfold is?

I know the hit single and its chorus of schoolyard chants. I know the video with pretty girls dancing in a classroom. And yes, I know what a centerfold is. It’s the picture in the middle of a magazine. Like a poster! Like the one I will later pull out from a teen magazine, the poster of Michael Jackson, with the creases I can never smooth away, the telltale sign that a poster was once folded and not as valuable anymore, yes, that is what a centerfold is to me, and while my Nana does not say anything more, I never forget her piercing concern. The way she let me know she had so much more to say but would not.

At age seven I don’t own a camera. I have no sense of the power of photographs. I know nothing of modeling or pornography or a typical magazine’s vast distribution network, so when J. Geils Band lead singer Peter Wolf sings of opening up that girlie magazine and finding his ex who was once “pure like snowflakes” framed on the page, frozen for the world to see, I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand his sense of loss. Or if this is a terrible a-ha moment when he knows once and for all that nothing is sacred, that everything can be stained—well, these claims of corruption sail over my head—yet somehow stick. Frames that are frozen, now, in me.

Leave our apartment complex and decide not to go to Oakland Mall, go the other way towards the 7-11 on John R road, and you can drive by Augie’s. I noticed Augie’s, a lot, with its sign announcing upcoming bands and drink specials. My family never went inside. But I knew it was a country bar. Little me imagined singer-songwriter Juice Newton, my angel of the morning, accompanied yet standing solo in a smoky haze, spotlight on her face. Or my Crystal Gayle with her impossibly long hair and tight blue jeans. My mother favored Country & Western and I loved the vocalists, the yearning in their songs. I’d seen enough movies to know that in honkytonks, the men could fight and throw bottles, yet somehow the angelic singers stood above, wore the soft, fuzzy sweaters, too magical to touch. I knew nothing of the women’s true lives or the roughness of the music business. To me, these women stood for flag-waving American beauty, and I felt a heart tug when I saw the Augie’s sign. In that honkytonk, angels sang. The men ached to be by their side.

Neighbor kids might have worn white-armed concert jerseys, but we didn’t talk much music. But there was plenty of talk. In the grassy commons, I heard the curse “whore” for the first time. Kids must have said “whore” often because I can still summon the mental imagery. First, I’d spell the word as “hoar.” I’d see the letters in my head: H O A R. Then what did I see? An overweight homeless woman in scraggly clothes, pushing a grocery cart filled with her belongings. The worse kind of outcast. Nobody would keep on loving her.

Selected measures of a girl who becomes a woman include: age; weight; height; daily calorie intake; chest, waist, and hip measurements; bra cup. They also include: number of boys kissed; number of girls kissed; age of virginity loss; number of sex partners; number of times in love. Unfortunately, they also include: number of times touched against her will; number of times raped; number of times believed; number of human beings she can trust with this information. They also include number of pregnancies, number of live births, number of stillbirths and terminations. Question: Is it true what isn’t measured isn’t counted? Question: If we lived in a matriarchal society, would the measures change? There are other important measures, such as age woman realizes she can reject these measures. And age she realizes that if she can’t reject, she can stop caring so much. And age she stops counting at all.

In high school I’d never admit to caring about boy groupthink, but that didn’t stop the boys from ranking us and arraying us on grids. Who is hotter than who. Who doesn’t deserve to live. Even at a high school debate camp, the boys rated us. Some of us ranked. Some did not.

I wrote well, debated, stacked achievements that got me noticed as a young leader. My GPA, my ACT and SAT and AP scores, they counted, yes, but I knew what stats made you valued by boys.

I pushed myself not to care. Detach I told myself, without having that word yet. But…

I remember coming in second place. The boy debaters rated the girl debaters, and the boy I liked fessed up, said they did rate us, and I placed second. But you should have been first.

If you’ve ever wanted to be valued in this life, tell me you wouldn’t feel something. Tell me you’d feel nothing at all.

When I was fifteen I flirted with a modeling career. This ambition lasted a few months, and generated a few jobs, including a Ram’s Horn TV spot and a music video. I’m left with a scrapbook with a single contact sheet, one tear sheet, and a few pictures my mother liked enough to enlarge.

I stopped modeling because I was told by the head of a Detroit modeling outfit that I should lose 10 pounds. I was 5’10 and 128 lbs. I was thin enough to be hired for local jobs, but not thin enough to compete in New York. Of course, this was before Kate Moss and the shrinking to bone of so many model bodies. A few years later and I may have been told 20 pounds. Or, don’t come back.

But I remember the weekend I was told to change my body to make myself more valuable. So many ways to make it in this world—did I really want to rely on looks, given how subjective beauty is, how one person sees me and the next person sees past me? I also knew beauty to be a diminishing power source and few modeling careers lasted long. And there was the reality of being a model. By high school I’d seen so many movie scenes of predators making promises and young aspirants forced to take unwanted photos or sleep with the gatekeepers that I feared abuse was part of the deal.

At the end of the weekend, I told my mother no. I won’t lose weight for them. I don’t want their power that badly.

I always felt this was a righteous decision, though at times I wonder if I choked. It’s hard to know. I know what Joseph Jackson would have said: get on the treadmill. But my mother wasn’t like that. She never pushed. I always wonder if greatness in the performing arts, even if that performance is posing and walking—demands a slave-driving guardian with an iron grip on the reins, or the whip, willing to withhold love or resources for desired outcomes. I don’t know.

But I remember the photo studio, an airy loft above Niki’s Pizza in Greektown. I remember the lights. The focus. On me. And the photographer, soft-spoken but firm, giving instructions, the subtle tilts of chin. How it felt to have someone seriously do my makeup, hair, but also appraise, advise me to wax off the downy, barely there hair on my face. The photographer told me to bring three different looks and I think often on the fuchsia crepe gown that my mother and I bought from Saks Fifth Avenue—knowing we’d return it after the shoot, and those silver stilettos that went with it. I still have the 8 x 10 color still. I’d never wear such an expensive dress again. The photographer also asked me to bring a classic business look and lingerie. A strange feeling, buying a teddy with my mother and I’m only fifteen. But we did it. And there’s nothing pornographic about the resultant shot, but I am dressed in black lace and posing with a muscular man you only see from behind. The picture ran in a local weekly. Not a centerfold. Just a black and white still. I did all of this for the book I was expected to build, if I wanted a career. They told me that I had something. And whether I did or not, I never took pictures I wanted to take back. I never felt exposed.

The J. Geils Band song says Angel’s wearing a negligee. She could still be exposed, this is still a girlie magazine. But maybe she’s not. Her outfit may be skimpy but plenty of teddys cover nipples and crotch. Maybe this isn’t the lingerie you find in sex shops that lift and offer naked breasts, that leave down there open for whatever the lover wants to do. Maybe she is perfectly covered if using our American media-agreed standard of what is allowed on mainstream magazine covers. Maybe no one should be mad. But as I grow older, I learn that for some men, this is not covered enough. That for some men, no one else should be entitled to stare at his woman in lust, and if a woman poses like this, she is an accomplice to the theft of what is supposed to be his. Tom Petty sings everybody’s got to fight to be free but for us women, those of us in the United States of America, with the Bill of Rights and civil rights and a legal status that is clearly on better footing than many other places in this world, but not all, I can’t help but think of us as free people of color during slave days. Yes, we’re free. But precariously so. Someone could hi-jack us. Domineering men abound. Some are charismatic, some are just bullies. And what happens to you if your man’s religion tells him you need to be modest? What happens to you if his ego tells him he needs to keep you in place? What happens to you if he’s just jealous? The centerfold wears a negligee and while Peter Wolf seems wounded, he doesn’t seem angry. But this doesn’t mean he hasn’t judged her. This doesn’t mean he isn’t holding what he considers the paper proof of her morals, of what she is willing to do for another man, for money. He’d still fuck her—of course, why not, she’s not too ruined for that—but I imagine an open place for her in his heart is now closed.

Sometimes porn is on the syllabus. At college, in a city a thousand miles away, I’ll take my first women’s studies course. One day, our professor, with her tender eyes and brow of earnest brilliance, she will lead us on a procession to the front of the room. On a table usually used for Danish pastries and cut sandwiches, she’s displayed what has been vilified in our syllabus readings, the slick-paged porn magazines, soft-core to hard, open for us to gaze, gawk, or quickly turn away from as our single-file line of nineteen and twenty-ish women proceeds down the aisle—no nah nah, na nah nah nah chorus of "Angel is a Centerfold," just my knotted stomach as we are instructed to look at exhibits A, B, C (and triple D), to take our time with the proof of women’s victimization and commodification for us right there, proof on paper. Proof of the insatiable market demand, for having studied this intersection of patriarchy and capitalism, as pornography was consistently characterized in the readings, any notions of participant consent are tainted in our eyes. I can still hear the professor telling us that yes, we may find ourselves aroused by these pictures, but that is normal, understandable in our culture where the imagery of pop culture constantly tiptoes to the brink of pornography—surrounds us, is doing all it can to make us open our wallets and buy, be. But in this fluorescent-lit classroom, in this slow procession to the front of the class, no pictures arouse me when it’s my turn to stare at the legs splayed, mouths splayed, the permanent splay the photo creates, the photo editor enforces when there are no next frames showing the legs close, the mouths close, the cleansed face, and there is forever open invitation. No ropes show but she’s been hogtied for as long as the image exists. And there it is—the most famous image of our classroom readings, the oiled legs sticking out of the meatgrinder, and the other side ground meat—and there’s the one with the woman stuck face-first in a garbage can and she is just legs and ass. And she is trash. And she is meat. And she is a joke. And she is an arousing set of glory holes. And she is trauma for an onlooker. And she has been paid or not paid for this public display. My senses don’t betray the gravity of the moment. I am not turned on. I feel numb, the grief that something I hoped would be proven wrong is not, and for some moments, I hold that horror inside until it crusts over, becomes knowledge I don’t know what to do with, becomes scar tissue, becomes something I can’t really touch twenty years later as I write this because I’ve seen more life since then, enough to know that these pictures are not the whole of male desire, of male-female relations, but the horror is still there, still something I’d rather not feel or stare at for long.

When I’m a college senior one of my male roommates subscribes to Playboy and keeps it on the living room magazine stand with Time and Sports Illustrated. My female roommate and I will look askance at it, but chalk it up to the men’s newfound freedom. My boyfriend, eleven years older, will laugh when he sees a copy, recall the way he knew a male flight attendant neighbor was gay because he subscribed to the Playboy channel, declaring that nothing about Playboy was hardcore enough to give straight men real pleasure.

But my closest male roommate claimed otherwise. One night after drinking and exchanging backrubs he tells me: this is what we do. We pick up a magazine like this and we look for the picture of the girl that looks closest to the girl we want in real life. Then we imagine. We imagine the model is her. And when he tells me that, I feel like I’ve been let inside, the kind of entry earned by intimacy. A sharing that isn’t for sale.

I’ve cried over pornography. I remember a birthday in my 20s and I catch my beloved with a DVD and I see the cover picture – all black women. Am I a fetish? The women have darker skin than I do. Does he prefer them to me? I remember, years later, catching a porn site left on a computer. My beloved had watched a Japanese woman giving oral sex. I am nothing like the Japanese woman, physically. Does that mean he wants women who are nothing like me? Maybe. Yes. No. All of the above? I cried. Loyal men. Devoted men. To me. But this felt like betrayal. Rightful attentions given to strangers. What should have been mine was gone.

And I remember that French gas station in my late 20s, off a highway outside of Paris. I am with my first husband, and we’ve stopped, and I’ve gone in for water and snacks and there’s a man leafing through a pornographic magazine. This man, in his late 30s?, in ordinary office work clothes, ordinary short-cut hair, exhibits no shame, is the picture of normalcy with his naked posed women as I look for Haribo candies. Deep rage wells inside me. I’m pissed at how easy it is for men. Hot and horny? Here’s a mag. There’s a DVD. Now, just press press press and anything you want is on the private screen of your smart phone. I am not a man. Maybe I don’t understand how unthreatened I should be. That there’s no malice, normally. The average guy isn’t trying to fantasize women into meat grinders. How this need not be about us at all, more about years of habit and how to cope with desire.

But even if that’s so, there’s relief, no? I think of my struggles with monogamy. How as I learned to be first married, I thought about old boyfriends, and found myself preyed upon by men who could smell a troubled young wife miles away. All I could do to resist those men. If I fantasized about them, I couldn’t claim harmlessness. Fantasy creates an opening, a focus that is valuable: it’s your very presence spent on strangers. And porn couldn’t give me what I thought I’d find in other people’s arms. So fuck the gas station guy, getting his needs met by girls on film. Fuck him just standing here, I thought, like it’s nothing. Like he’s not even embarrassed that I’m staring at him. Of course, I know nothing about this man. I could have been raging against a man mid-trauma. For what if it turned out he knew the woman in the pictures? What if I’d found the French Peter Wolf right there, too stunned to move from this gas station aisle, because that was his beloved staring back? Maybe a terrible truth had been proven: No woman was an angel. Not even his.

That’s possible. Right?

It’s 1998, I’m 24, and late night for me is even later for my boyfriend, because he’s calling from England, from his parents’ house in Essex near the sea, the semi-detached home that reveals their privileged middle-class status. But since he is a graduate student, with no job, he is spending his mother’s money to call me, expensive Ps, more expensive per minute than the 10 cents I’m charged by Sprint. I budget $200 a month for our calls. I know he has something he really wants to say. While I work in America and he finishes school in England I want to keep this young love alive, but on this night, when I’ve answered the phone quickly so my roommate won’t be awakened, he has said ten words and I know he’s drunk. He can speak his English with a certain savoring of the syllables, again, the privilege, the delight in the language of his heritage and place but tonight, there are extra lags and I know that my boyfriend is not home, that I am with his shadow.

I was on the Internet today, he said. Do you know what I saw?

No.

Well, I saw you. And there’s something about the way he says you.

I saw you in a picture, he added.

What kind of picture? I ask, seized with anxiety.

You know what kind.

In that panicked moment, I am scrambling inside, suffused with the self-doubt an interrogator can inflict when you start to doubt your own innocence, wonder if you somehow committed the crime you’ve been accused, sleepwalked it somehow, or, in this case, got set-up, for is it possible a past lover photographed me without me knowing and shared it with a website that would post?

I saw you on a special site. A special site for men. Pictures of women who should be virgins but are fucked, asking to be fucked, ready to be fucked, after-fucked, this is the site I’m talking about, the site for ex-virgins, for whores like you.

He doesn’t say that, of course. He says he saw a girl who looked so much like me, was I sure it wasn’t me, and in that moment of feeling caught in the frame, I reassure him that of course it wasn’t me. An ocean separates us, and I know that if he were next to me, he’d never grow violent, not with his hands. But terror flows through me still.

He has a case if he wishes to make it. He could talk about the Christmas holiday in 1996, that time he’d presumed our exclusivity by virtue of the fact that we had slept together. I told him many times that in America, it doesn’t work that way, that believe me, there are a million women who wish it did but it does not. We never said that we were exclusive. He just assumed. And when he learned of the ex-boyfriends I saw during my trip home, the wound was deep. And if it wasn’t deep, it was something that my apologies and later monogamy could not heal. Whatever ingredient he used to build trust in us had dissolved.

The next day my English boyfriend calls back and apologizes. I accept his apology. This is our pattern. The shadow shows up after drinking, cruel things get said, next morning, apology. It’s a relief. We are so young. We are still learning what we can and cannot accept in love.

In the song, Peter Wolf sounds like he accepts the situation. Sure, there’s initial shock. But then he sings that he and his ex can take it to a hotel room and take it off in private. Sex can make amends for the unlawful giving away of what should have been his, or of only a few people, not to just anyone who can buy a magazine. But my question is, say, this really happens, and if she doesn’t want to go to that hotel room, will he feel entitled to force her? Will he feel pushed to punish her, too?

I don’t see the J. Geils Band anymore. Instead I think of the girls who sold themselves for pictures, sex acts, and then got left in swampy fields. Left on beaches. In parking lots. Those girls who placed ads on Craigs List. Show up to the Days Inn, the Motel Six, the Waldorf. The Airbnb apartment rented for the weekend so he can do whatever he pays for, try to get away with what he won’t. Maybe she has sex with him. Maybe he follows all of her rules. Maybe he pays her the right amount, plus tip. But. She risks all if he does not. She risks that scene in Leaving Las Vegas when Elizabeth Shue’s character enters the hotel room and there are three male college students who want anal sex and when she tries to leave they beat and rape her and film the whole thing. What kind of annihilation did these men attempt? What kind of annihilation did they immortalize on tape? There will be men and women who think that if someone is selling her body, there is no such thing as unearned consequences, but of course that’s bullshit. You don’t sell yourself into enslavement. You make an agreement. And they violated hers beyond measure. She lives. According to the script, according to the motion picture still available for purchase or Netflix rental, the character played by Elisabeth Shue goes on to play angel to the suicidal character played by Nicholas Cage. She lives while he dies. But many women treated this way do not live. They keep breathing but they’ve retreated so deeply into themselves they are shadow people. No one can touch them. And that is no way to live.

I’m a mother, a wife now, and when I cook dinner, I turn on the kitchen radio to the oldies station, WCBS in New York City. Hello this is Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac and you’re listening to the greatest songs of all-time as they slide into Dreams. But once a week—once a day?—I soak a dish, or defrost chicken breast, and there it comes – the nah nah, nah nah nah chorus of "Angel Is a Centerfold." Thirty years later, this is the one J. Geils Band song they choose to canonize.

I hear "Angel is a Centerfold" and the lyrics don’t slip straight into the subconscious. I think about every single word.

The first time I type this paragraph, I write: this song still doesn’t apply to me. I’m no angel and I’ve never been a centerfold. But maybe I’m more like Peter Wolf than I admit. Maybe I’ve cried for something that was never mine.

Peter sings on. I can’t escape his voice. His story. God it’s so easy to dismiss a song as nothing. As a child, I thought his music would be the best birthday present. I used to save my pennies for rock forty-fives. I used to cross a dangerous thoroughfare just to make them my own. Ask me now to sing all of "Angel is a Centerfold" and I won’t mess up a single word.

An American folk tale committed to heart.

Asian in a Redneck Town

Diana Keren Lee

In high school plays, I was remembered for my roles as a man and an animal. Dressing like a boy kept me from being mistaken for a prostitute or a ghost.

every time they ask if we’ll rebuild

Haley Sledge

humans are not obedient, like animals, to the seasons, but seasons we can circumvent, touch tenderly with a ten foot stick of satisfaction, simultaneously of and above but

the muck bodied memory of a meteorologist, briny with lips of catastrophe, generates the shock of lost cattails. whole and gritty, repression, protrusion. at an uncontrolled muddy compasse of oh, bizarre swirling. oh, controlled smell. oh, hips, sand, category of encompassing taste: the whir-grit-sea the dirty-salty of cataclysmic tame

as humans, oh: destruction’s sinuous crumbling of oh, fishy oh, whirl. this fearful battering troposphere

A Hurricane Watch Has Been Issued for Your Area:

house on the ground and sea in the sky there’s a uh um my mother’s picture ahh there’s a um rusted out truck it’s over and it’s outside in the finally rain um an iron on the sand and family in a tent ugh trailer trailer trailer trailer wailing in the hurt-shine

house? I uh here’s a picture um do you want this? um do you want this? uh should we keep it? hush that baby hush it go go inside? there’s ugh moss in my hair ugh muddy in my mouth uh tetanus shot tetanus shot tetanus um here uh sit drink breath shovel shovel shovel shovel it uh out through the uh kitchen door that’s uh across the um street now with all of our um childhood heights maked now um illegible under um mold under mold. walk soothe there’s a man lost um a woman sweeps her slab the baby asks why the baby asks why, “why the house fall down? why the house fall down? why she sweepin the ground? why she sweepin the ground?” baby answers, “no house no house house there,” and points to the Gulf. there is a bench our grandpere made with mold mold mold on everything death growing over the ugh objects of your life in the middle of i’m sorry here’s a can of soup i’m sorry here’s a bundle of tupperware i’m sorry where’s the uh what about the uh the thibodeauxs the uh the bagleys the uh the beringers the neighbors the uh their daughter and the waterline the waterline the kids survived i can’t i’ve never i don’t know where the money the cats survived they found him in his truck not a moment too soon i don’t know where ugh should i wait it’s ugh i should could i um how to ugh ugh ugh the roof upside down the house flat gone a shoe waves in the sea a front door in a tree a shrimping boat above pines like it was meant to be there

A Hurricane Watch Has Been Issued for Your Area:

miss bourgeois weeding her muck garden with a sailboat dangling over her head, the shreds of its sails like leaves in a warped salt-choked oak

ramond robicheaux kneeling in pascagoula beach, “she was such a strong swimmer, she’ll give her back, she’ll give her back, give her back,” but there is nothing for a voice to echo off of when facing the Gulf

A Recommended Evacuation Order Has Been Issued for Your Area. Contraflow Evacuation Routes Have Opened in Your State:

before she comes to visit, we board our windows. we shop like starved beasts, and hoarding gallons of water, loaves of bread, we boil all the shrimp, barbecue all the meat, stuff the babies with milk, and roll the cheese into logs peppered with crushed pecans. all the family, all the neighbors, all the town meanders at a notch above normal. we laugh nervously. the old ladies finger rosaries made from rose petals, roses that grew in a garden where mary herself appeared to small french children, our ancestors, those petals picked and rolled and boiled by the delicate needle fingers of the dominican nuns who traveled great lengths to have them blessed by the pope himself. if they were wealthy enough, the women got these rosaries from italy themselves, more often than not, they bought them at the visitation monastery on spring hill avenue. there, they pray the hurricanes wouldn’t get us

fathers with huge bellies gulp beer until they slosh it on the ground or someone’s kid steals a sip. a mother or two dabbs embarrassed tears as she recalls last time last time last time last time when her husband her brother her grandbaby her daughter her friend her mother father aunt uncle cousin or dear elderly neighbor (we didn’t know she didn't have anyone) stayed too late, or couldn’t climb the stairs, or got caught in the attic screaming for jesus to please come please save her you savior as her kissing lips press the top of an attic roof her father or grandfather or his father before him sanded and painted and nailed with his own hands, she presses her kissing lips there as the water covers her face and as the rouge tide takes her as the wood is too thick the ax too heavy her arms too feeble she holds her rose rosary saying hail mary full of grace hail mary full of grace hail mary full of grace hail mary full of grace take me take me don’t let me know this end

A Mandatory Evacuation Order Has Been Issued for Your Area. A Curfew Will be Implemented:

wear your most starched shirt wear your most starched shirt wear your most starched shirt we are going to a funeral two funerals several funerals we’d go to the movies but there are no movies our grandmere told us at the same time she told us about her friend, the nun, who stayed up all night with our grandmere on bourbon street until the sun rose over the mississippi river where they ate beignets so cliche to celebrate her last night of freedom before she selected seclusion at the visitation monastery on spring hill ave where they pray that hurricanes won't get us here. grandmere’s friend the nun prays that hurricanes won't us here and one has yet to, directly, at least since camille when almost every tree on spring hill avenue threw its spanish moss into the street. grieving, naked, and exposed, they suffer the indignity of their blown back branches, limbs stretched to breaking, languishing, and held only by the memory of their shade in the easter parade. we pick up their babies and grandbabies from the avenue, bath them in bay water by the buckets, a baptism a birthing, and gather those babies in plastic bags, bring them to the center of town to the cathedral of the immaculate conception to burn them in homage in sacrifice crying not again not again not again, but

A Forced Evacuation Order Has Neen Issued for Your Area. Evacuation Routes Will Be Closed:

everyone knows it’s not the eye to be scared of. on every porch in town the roof is painted blue for fashion or insects now it’s brown and green and stinks with rotting bodies and lays in the neighbor’s garden littered with children’s play things, fine china, muck

If You Refuse to Leave, You Will Not Have Cause of Action for Death, Damages, or Injuries Against the State, Any Political Subdivision, or Agency. You Will Not Be Rescued. You Will Not Be Provided with Lifesaving Assistance:

every day for weeks no power every day for weeks no school every day for weeks no work every day for weeks we drive to the dying house hold our breath try not to vomit here’s a shovel, here’s a mask, did you get your tetanus shot yet? are you sure, don’t touch that with your skin it’ll kill you and get those babies out of here don’t let it touch their little eyes too much too much too much too soon it’ll grow in there in their brains and they’ll remember the sight, but we can’t keep them from the smell-we’ll always remember the smell

*statistically, the longer a resident lives on the Gulf Coast the less likely they are to evacuate for a hurricane

from The Immanent Field

Michael Martin Shea

The first time I had sex I was too drunk to remember it ⋅A political machine made entirely out of babies ⋅ The first affair occurred in a different time zone, or in a different zone of time ⋅ On the train, a politic of still-living bodies ⋅ Zoning laws prevent the poor from occupying our sense of nation ⋅ On the train from Portland I ate a pot brownie and kept picturing my body careening from the window ⋅ The zone of the law inverts what it calls our real lives ⋅ What music makes is not imaginary ⋅ I’m calling on you, lord of the tropical nausea ⋅ The garden house was the full sum of our outer imagination ⋅ I’m calling on you, lord of the remote handjobs ⋅ I’m thankful enough not to have the outward signs of perversion ⋅ Lorded over like some kind of porcupine nocturne ⋅ I’m thankful now for the deliverance of babies ⋅ Like some kind of pork rind straight from the mini-mart ⋅ Abjection delivery service is available for an additional fee ⋅ The Martian experience was cancelled because we couldn’t get along here ⋅ The artist must always resist being in service to empire ⋅ Cancellation of our grand narrative was met with resistance from originating parties ⋅ The artist’s relation to the object of art is one of both service and pity ⋅ Taking pot shots at our grandest achievement: the bank ⋅ The object of art is not to lay prone in the backyard while the morning glories wither

from The Immanent Field

Michael Martin Shea

A line continues forever regardless of our feeble presence ⋅A tenuous attempt to prove my capacity for human emotion ⋅ Presently, I don’t think about death so long as I’m moving forward ⋅ I capsized my little boat in brackish waters and waited for the warmth ⋅ I moved across the country to live with a beautiful and fearsome woman ⋅ What houses of warmth we offer, wringing our selves ⋅ I’m in love with a woman who lives in the bathtub ⋅ The house of our elder lords is itself a minor shadow ⋅ Love does not extend itself as a purgatory for other loves ⋅ The minority of my art is a result of my utter comfort ⋅ Pages of work only prove that I was alone with myself ⋅ A comfortable robe robs the artist of productive fire ⋅ Disrupted and alone, suffused and alone, throwing our cell phones at the wall and alone ⋅ In church, I was told to be “on fire” for god without explanation ⋅ A casual case of loneliness can lurk in any apartment ⋅ “Poetry isn’t about anything” is a way of explaining that I have no idea what I’m doing ⋅ I let myself in using the key under the mat and promptly went about searching for BDSM paraphernalia ⋅ A presumption of knowing is in alignment with the holders of law ⋅ I let myself believe that the desperation of others secured my future ⋅ I know the shadows that come with internet porn ⋅ The future belongs to WalMart and all its naked stockholders ⋅ I named my first child Pornografica, after her mother

from The Immanent Field

Michael Martin Shea

What the collective wants is often boring, like the movies ⋅I was called upon to donate my body to the artist’s fund ⋅ Just wanting a more engaged and loving society has never stopped a drug war ⋅ Once, she called me “babe” ⋅ I was engaged to a fabricated life plan ⋅ She called me “drummer boy” ⋅ The fabric of my days grew pills from over-washing ⋅ She called me from San Antonio to say that she’d been assaulted ⋅ Fabricated currency still buys the lives of real artists ⋅ She called herself a cheater but it was the afternoon and I was too drunk to understand what she really meant ⋅ The artistic temperament is no license to be a negligible asshole ⋅ A proliferation of pronouns precludes the easy separation of the sections of my life ⋅ Temperance as faith in your natural abilities ⋅ A finite sectioning as required by our fallible senses ⋅ I am not able to see my life as a continuation of object-states ⋅ Where are the space rangers who promised us infinite planets? ⋅ I’m the guy with the shovel who’s yelling “We don’t have to be afraid anymore” to no one in particular ⋅ The space required for communal action restricted by zoning laws and apartment-style housing ⋅ I’m the guy sharpening his shovel in the bathroom and dreaming of exotic pizzas ⋅ The death of our parents had us zoned for re-development ⋅ The absurdity of my life does not necessitate digging a big hole to fall into

from the Woodlands

Cate Peebles

There’s chairs & more chairs that look like all the other chairs but are also slightly different by virtue of curve, color, material & blink there are tables now, beds & beds & beds, where will I sleep & wait & hold & curse & blame & snooze into the future, as we’re here to choose a cozy setting for my wanting & my wishing to not want anything from anyone, which only makes the want & wish too bold, but are we not tame towel racks & terrifying paisley duvets all at once in our impossible to pronounce Nordic habitats—so THIS is how to screw your past life into the present tabletop that holds our cheese & seltzer—& we wonder if this hand-woven rug will make it all better once & for all with its tightly knit piles complete & uniform, this maze of how-to instructions to build your whole life more pleasantly cannot wrench our dismantled & mutable alliance nor construct for us any pictorial solutions when we stare deep into the hamster’s eyes through mute glass & search for the correct dried krill to feed the tropical fish

from the Woodlands

Cate Peebles

I’m no painter & have zero idea where the green should go although I know I like it when I see it when you’re on the floor there crawling with a brush between your teeth to make something appear where it never had business existing because you saw something on the side of the road & thought it needed an afterlife from your hands & head & that’s a pearl-sized thought to have about creation, about the world as it must be taken & struck for daily fire & nailed to a wall to view blankly because we’re trapped serpents inside a wicker basket our nighttime spent in constant revival to conjure discrete forms that go into our bodies like lost squirrels in a mine shaft & this is how I say it’s dangerous as a solitary arrow in the gut you just get used to as it grows a new home inside you, but you don’t know how to say with certainty: TAKE IT OUT no matter how many vital shades you scrape off the side of the embankment or scraps of bark you hide in drawers next to the condoms but still there are things we do with our clumsy hands that seep into our sun-filled bodies, sink & stay & leave a fuchsia splatter stained on white linen that has no clue what it needs, but it takes what light it wants

from the Woodlands

Cate Peebles

He was shot in the neck right here, you say, as we cross the intersection against the light & you reach for my hand as if holding it would save us from bears & guns & each other; an invisible shield locked in place by fingers that could stop a hurricane short & everyone sent home safe & we haven’t had any coffee yet but have already asked: would you push a man off the cliff if you knew it would save a town—but how could you choose to push the man, that’s murder, you don’t push the man, you say, you don’t push the man & we wake up & we play screw, murder, marry with old masters, driving to my car in the lot where I hold your head above my eggshell breast & sop your ochre curls with my whole face like horsehair & glows like Madonna col bambino in a barn fire & the smooth strands brush my cheek as I push away, climb out of your car & sink like a wound, back into my own

Making Love with a Boston Fern

Lauren Aimee Curtis

One night I watched my neighbour making love with a Boston fern. It was all ooohs and ahhhs and heavy breathing—she was caressing the stems and whispering something I couldn’t hear. I saw the silhouette of her big body from my balcony as I stood in the dark watching her. Earlier that night I’d had trouble sleeping after hearing muted thumping and wet panting. It was coming from Babette’s room next door.

In the mornings, and sometimes in the afternoons, I liked to watch my neighbour while she tended to her plants. She was always trimming or spraying the leaves, pulling down her rosy pink shades to shield them from direct sunlight. I thought it was a lot of fretting. At night I’d watch her inside her bedroom through the glass doors while she changed into her fluffy pyjamas, or while she sat typing at her computer, her large stomach resting on her knees. I imagined she wrote some kind of vampire-romance fiction and that she was wildly rich because she rarely left the house. When she did, I’d watch her waddle down the street.

Babette was always asking me how often I masturbated. She liked making me blush, and I suppose she thought I was still a virgin. Whenever she’d get this way our other housemate, Bill, would leave the room out of politeness. He’s asexual, Babette would say to me. Something else she liked to say was—between you and him, I’m living in a nunnery. But she didn’t know about my first boyfriend, and all the things he liked to do in his car, or in movie theatres, or in his classroom, although we were extra careful when we did them. Nobody knew, except my mother, and that was just fine with me—I’ve been keeping secrets my whole life.

At the department store where I worked I had two bosses—one fat, one thin. They were having an affair. The fat one was small and round and wore too much make up. The thin one was tall and balding with a stringy patch of dyed black hair he kept in a low greasy ponytail. He had pimples on his neck. My only friend at work was a girl named Karina. Her boyfriend had recently been released from prison and she’d often talk about how attractive he was, how once she’d glassed a girl for just looking at him. Karina had green eyes, fake red nails with delicate Chinese symbols painted on them, and a piercing on her clitoris. I knew this because she showed it to me one day when we were hiding in the change rooms. She was telling me about a bender she’d been on with the boyfriend when all of a sudden she stood up and pulled her pants down. I nodded a few times and then stared at the wall in front of me. We didn’t have much in common but I liked her. All the other women in the department store were older, suspicious. They hated Karina. They liked me because they found me non-offensive and non-threatening. They were always patting me on the head.

About once a week the fat boss and the thin boss would call me into their office for meetings. It was a beige room with no windows and hospital-coloured lighting. Inside it was hot and stuffy and often it smelt like microwaved sausages. I’d watch them while they talked, sitting side by side at their communal desk and I’d imagine them having sex on it, or eating microwaved sausages, or doing both simultaneously. When I’d pay attention the thin one would be talking and winking and saying something about hunger, how I had it, that I’d shown promise, and was I interested progressing up the ladder? I’d shake my head and tell them I wasn’t ready yet but one time they called my bluff: You think you’re better than this? Of course not, I’d said. I knew where I stood. I spent my working days with women who wore pearl necklaces and three hundred dollar scarves. They were always returning things. There was a lot of tut tut tutting that went on. When I first started working at the department store Karina and I would take our breaks together. We’d go to the food court and eat a samosa still dripping with oil or fried chicken wings and she’d talk about shaving her boyfriend’s back while I listened with my head down. But Karina lost shifts, and after a while I found myself having lunch in the break room with twenty other women—everyone sweating and eating salads, watching daytime television.

When I left Hobart I told myself there was no going back and my mother had agreed this was for the best. I’d arrived in Sydney knowing no one, found myself a job and a place to live but these small victories did nothing to squash the tightness in my chest. At night I’d dream about the old boyfriend. The dreams were hardly nightmares, there was nothing sinister to them and yet this made them sinister. What was the point? It was the boyfriend talking on the phone, or getting dressed, or sitting at his desk smiling. Once it was him just drinking a strawberry milkshake—that was the whole dream.

At home, age twelve, and my mother told me that my imagination was too wild. When she was angry, I’d notice the little bits of sweat on her upper lip. These lies, she’d said later on about the teacher, they hurt people. She was ashamed, she only hoped it wouldn’t get out. But in the days after I told her she looked at me differently and I could tell that she knew it wasn’t a lie, and perhaps she could tell that I knew she knew, and we both agreed to go on pretending in this way, just to make it easier.

In February there was a heatwave. For three days in a row the temperature broke forty degrees and each night an apocalyptic-looking sunset blanketed the city. Babette, her boyfriend, Bill and I took turns having cold showers but there was little relief. On the third night we drove to the beach. The hot air and the warm water made everything slow. All around me I saw couples sliding their hands down each other’s swimsuits. Their skin melting until it looked like the same flesh. A giant orgy started on the sand—I watched it from the water. Everything was peach-coloured and buzzing. Even the ocean looked red.

When summer ended Babette broke up with the boyfriend and started hanging around the kitchen in a terry towel robe and drinking wine in a way that seemed like she really wanted us to know she was drinking wine. Bill and I started eating out just to avoid her. We went to the same Chinese restaurant most nights and sat on opposite ends of the room. Me with my book and him on his phone, pretending we didn’t notice one another. One night it was crowded and they sat us together. He ordered food for three—dumplings, sung choi bao, chicken spring pancakes, and when it came he ate all of it with his hands. I looked down at table and pursued my noodle soup in small, non-offensive sips. I asked him about our neighbour, I called her the obese woman. He said he’d never noticed her. I told him she wrote romance novels. I made up all sorts of things. He was holding a bit of pork mince in his fingers and a shiny layer of grease coated his lips and cheeks. I thought about licking it off. I imagined climbing on the table and grabbing his head with both hands, licking his entire face.

Sometime after that night I began writing letters to the obese woman anonymously and when I wrote them I held my pen differently, like I imagined a man would. I want to see you bent over, I wrote, I want to split you open from behind—that kind of stuff. At night I’d watch her while she sat in bed reading and when her light went off I’d go down to the street and walk right up to her front door, slip the letters underneath.

At the department store there was a woman who came in early every day, just as the glass doors were unlocked. She wore purple or pale green pantsuits, oversized sunglasses, and her hair was beehived. Sometimes she carried a large basket of vegetables from the Seven Star. When she’d walk past you could smell it on her: she was the kind of woman who drank before breakfast. We called her Red Hands because she wore red leather gloves, even when it was warm. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that this woman was mad. And yet, there was something attractive about being as mad as this woman. Secretly, I was envious of her. It was obvious she had money underneath all that madness, some kind of safety blanket. Her madness was eccentric and not dangerous, and it seemed to me that this distinction had everything to do with money.

At the beginning of July, an Ashram appeared on our street. At first we heard the sound of Hare Krishna singing waft in through the window accompanied by faint drumming. Then we saw two men in sarongs dancing down the street. A week later, four new members playing a tambourine, cowbells, and a triangle were added. Bill said he found it strangely calming but it was Babette who took to it completely. Soon she was wearing sarongs over her jeans, anklets with tiny bells, and swore off certain foods including avocadoes and pears, which Bill and I thought strange and unnecessary. Each time she came home she told us she felt lighter. She practiced yoga, she meditated in front of the television, and sometimes we heard her repeating affirmations in the bathroom. Mostly she talked about being enlightened, but when pressed, couldn’t articulate exactly what that meant to her. It seemed obvious. She hadn’t changed: only her devotion had shifted.

At the end of July the department store threw a party to celebrate the end of the financial year and we were told attendance was compulsory. It was held in the break room where a sad looking piece of crepe paper was taped to the wall. Everyone danced to a song that sounded like one long siren. I stood in the corner of the room with Karina and we watched everyone drink until their mouths softened. Their bodies followed, they hung loose. Soon they were hugging one another. An old Greek woman was telling anyone who’d listen about her son who was recently divorced and childless. The two bosses drank with their backs to each other and their partners stood next to them smiling and nodding and the night went on and on and on. I was waiting until everyone was drunk enough so that I could leave unnoticed. Karina disappeared into the bathroom every few minutes and when she’d come back she’d lick her lips and brush her hair manically with her hands. The bosses brought out a cake. I accidently locked eyes with the thin boss and he winked. Karina took me with her to the bathroom and when I followed her inside the cubicle she pulled out a little plastic bag of white powder. Eat this, she said. Out in the break room the night had escalated, the siren seemed to be on loop, and everyone’s faces looked grotesque. I felt nauseous. I ran back to the bathroom to vomit and when I came out I saw the thin boss standing against the door with his pants at his knees, playing with himself. He looked straight at me. I went back inside the cubicle and locked the door. I counted. I got to seventy-six. I could hear him and I could hear the taps running and when, at last, I could hear nothing, I left.

When I got home that night I found Babette in the backyard burning her sarongs, I didn’t ask why. I sat in the shower for what felt like hours. I thought about going home, showing up at my old front door, and even though part of me desperately wanted to, I decided it was too cheesy. For the first time in a while I let myself wonder about the teacher. That night in bed I tossed and turned but when I finally fell asleep I had no dreams.

Three days later when the thin boss finally showed up at work, he found me standing at the cash register with Red Hands. She was showing me the lettuces she’d bought—she’d arranged them from smallest to largest on the desk. My darlings—she was saying, gesturing to the lettuces, my little darlings. I felt his eyes sizing me up. He walked over and placed his hand gently on Red Hand’s shoulder, she slapped it away. I could tell by his body language that he remembered what had happened, and I knew he could tell that I hadn’t told anyone, and once again it was that too familiar feeling that we would go on pretending we didn’t know these things.

I left work without telling anyone and walked aimlessly around the city wondering about my job, whether I could still go back. I watched the buskers. The ones who brought amps and props or their son to sing with them, and as I watched I felt that sinking feeling I always felt when someone was being so overtly earnest that it felt false, like a performance of being earnest. I decided to go home and when I got there I saw my neighbour on her balcony tending to her plants. She wore pink gloves and a rose patterned blouse and her usually pale body was flushed red. I sat on my balcony and decided I’d watch her instead, because it’s always better to watch someone who doesn’t know they’re being watched. She was planting basil and rosemary and something else I couldn’t make out. She even took some of the more sad-looking plants down and left them out the front of her house next to the bins. I sat there until the sun went down. I watched the bats fly from the city to the east. When it was completely dark I watched everyone on my street through their apartment windows while they ate, undressed, and eventually, lay down with one another. I watched them until they closed their curtains and their lights went out. I admitted to myself, out loud, that I was lonely, and then immediately took it back. Later that night, when everyone was asleep, I went down to my neighbour’s house and took the yellowing fern and drooping palm she’d left back up to my balcony. When I looked up I saw her watching me and we locked eyes for the first time.

System of Safety

Nora Toomey

heard she was studying immunity

how shape enters shape

heard she was branch come down

a bullet

she was product—

may be rotten

System of Safety

Nora Toomey

if you carry an animal

push wool

through the snow

the animal loses focus

says, I'm fine

System of Safety

Nora Toomey

picture a ring

the spinning bell

inside the deer

picture gambling

slicing into the deer

what it's like

to look down