Peter Hajinian

Peter Hajinian lives, works, and writes in Minneapolis. His stories have appeared in Litro, The Quotable, and Halfway Down The Stairs. You can read and enjoy more of his work at the King Zucchini.

+ King Zucchini

On Wednesday, I ran into a friend of a friend, Ted. One of those people you meet once, but because of a life change or accident, you hear a lot about them from a distance. Ted’s story, as I gathered in snippets from other friends, was that he went blind. As a photographer, this news entranced and horrified me. Could that really happen?

Ted could see just fine when I first met him. Or so I thought. Apparently, his vision had shown signs of weakness even back then, but he didn’t say anything. Now, at that coffee shop, — after a brief reintroduction — we shared a table and he told me the whole story.

The doctors couldn’t explain it. They just declared it inevitable. The second, third, fourth opinion, each one of them said the same thing. There hadn’t been any history of loss of eyesight in the family, and there was no accident that may have caused it to happen to him. He clicked his tongue, and silently walked home.

What do you do, when you lose your sight? They gave him pamphlets and books to prepare himself. He took them as an affront. Like putting a clock in a man’s hands and telling him when it runs out, so will his time on Earth. He left them alone and brooded.

What do you keep? What do you forget? He asked himself this while he waited for the bus one day. Staring off into the middle distance, eyes open without seeing. In the ark of his mind, he decided to store colors. He wanted to remember vibrancy.

Red, yellow, blue. He went primary. If he could remember those, he could cover off on the in-betweens. Also, he was having trouble remembering green. He’d stare at a verdant plant in full sunlight and close his eyes. Two minutes later it was gone.

Like a human camera, he worked to fill his memory with images. He questioned photographers on their craft, arriving at the conclusion that it’s all about light. Sunlight. That was when we met the first time. I was the one who showed him how to use a light meter.

But the strength of light wasn’t exactly what he was after. He carried around a small white square in his wallet, a white balance. As the vignette of blindness began to creep in on his vision, he’d find a spot in the afternoon sun to sit and gather the gold off the square.

The doctors were right, it was inevitable. Like the emptiness of space between stars, the darkness expanded, pushing the vibrancies he’d stored away further and further apart. Each afternoon, the white card faded in front of his eyes.

Long before this, he’d secretly read the pamphlets and books the doctors gave him. He’d learned to use a walking stick. He’d learned to keep track of the sums of money in his wallet, arranged his apartment to appeal to his new state. He’d prepped for everything they told him.

But it wasn’t enough, he told me. He felt like an astronaut, stepping out of the capsule into interstellar space. Even in the city he grew up in, the expanses between buildings felt huge. The yawning gaps between crosswalks. The prairies of parking lots. Endless stairs.

After a while, things took shape. They began to correspond to the vibrant colors in his head, separated by the negative space he never realized was there. His mind was mapping and remapping. Working in the dark to put together old bits of information. Fashioning something new. A universe, all his own, placed on top of the old one.

From his observatory, he’d work to improve his calculations of the distances and between heavenly bodies, charting their movement through space. When he was tired, he’d sit and enjoy the way the colors and lights and shapes arranged themselves in his mind.

What was it like, I asked him, to be the sole astronomer of this universe? He smiled and clicked his tongue, eyes staring purposefully into the middle distance.

“It’s brilliant.”

© Peter Hajinian

Ian Wallace

Ian spends most of his time wishing he could fly, and the rest writing and working. His poems can be found in Cairn, em:me, The Fine Line, and Mistletoe Madness: An Anthology of Christmas Poems. He lives down south with his wife and cat.

+ More of Tony’s work

I’ve tried to explain black holes before bed, in cold
electric nightlight. I traced the lines, the plane of your Henley
shirt showing the dips, gravity, never truly touching,
just grazing the infinite space of air and atoms that
hold our hands, but I would still move air and pressure,
math and physics, all over you, holding so firm that a singularity
forms as we were before there was dust, and we stretch
infinitely through all kinds of time; sickness, health, Greenwich Mean.

Matt — the Matt you never met — wants to be placed in a lawn chair
up on a hill to decompose. And when the crows scatter, the angry
crows that sound like German — that’s where anger comes
from — the neighborhood kids would come by and poke
him with whatever the spring grass hides. Then the crows
caught in daylight would form little dark stars and we’d wish
on those stars that our wishes would stop coming true.

© Ian Wallace

Dan Encarnacion

The bleak of Bela Tarr, the spare of Supersilent, the spike of quad-lattes palpitates Dan Encarnacion’s palpus in Portland, Oregon. A recipient of an MFA in Writing from the California College of the Arts, he has been published in MARGIE, Eleven Eleven, Berkeley Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, among others. His poem “Aposiopesis” was recently nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Prize. Imbibe the air, inebriate your cells, incubate the spores, insufflate the page.

What does he see?
Blackjack Poppa wonders, relentlessly wonders about what Little Rhumba sees.
What can he find with a dilated eye.
Blackjack Poppa’s querulous Queen Anne creaks and groans.
Through expanding joints, contracting armatures, snapping seams, skewing joists, the wind
          seeps in.
Blackjack Poppa’s centenarian Queen Anne-styled home airs aeolian moans.
The mass-manufactured Victorian filigree festoons frown lines and crow’s feet on it’s well-
          fenestrated face.
Unblinking, wide-paned eyes kept most moist by the San Francisco fog monitor days as if re
          strained seconds.
Winkless paned-eyes stick.
Blackjack Poppa lies.
Alone in bed.
Blackjack Poppa’s centenarian Queen Anne sighs—a knot in her stomach as if hungry for human
          life to feed her.
Alone, Blackjack Poppa gazes up into the mirror’d coffer’d ceiling of his heavy canopied bed.
The Queen Anne inhales.
More space.
The yellow-fingered sun her tonic.
The yellow-fingered sun thrums.
Having flicked away the fleece of the morning fog, the yellow-fingered sun pulls aside the edges
          of Blackjack Poppa’s thick velvet burgundy drapes, peering through as if an amateur.
An amateur before a well-seasoned audience.
Blackjack Poppa wonders.
If he lives with me, will things happen?
Wind seeps through, around contorted studs, warping further sticking windows, cracking
          cataracts in aged panes.
Inhales, the centenarian Queen Anne.
Peers, the amateuring yellow-fingered sun.
Into, under Blackjack Poppa’s canopy.
Blackjack Poppa decides to have.
Have to have.
Blackjack Poppa decides he will have to have the windows replaced before overhauling the
          kitchen.

© Dan Encarnacion

Elsa Kawai

Elsa Kawai is a designer and entrepreneur, and leads a creative team in San Francisco, New York and Poland. She is also co-founder and photographer at SayHelloMax, a women’s lifestyle brand. Elsa has previously collaborated with AOL, Yahoo, and others on branding, interaction design, product design and technology projects. Her work has been recognized by the Art Director’s Club and Webby Awards, among others. Elsa’s long-time interests include photography, travel and fashion.

+ Elsa Kawai
+ SayHelloMax

© Elsa Kawaii

Tony Rauch

Tony Rauch has three books of short stories published. The first two are more adult related, though young adults may enjoy them depending on if they understand the themes – “I’m right here” (spout press) and “Laredo” (Eraserhead Press). The third story collection is geared to Young Adults and reluctant readers – “Eyeballs growing all over me . . . again” (Eraserhead Press). An additional Young Adult title is forthcoming in the next few weeks – “As I floated in the jar.” He has been interviewed by the Prague Post, the Oxford Univ student paper in England, and Rain Taxi, and has been reviewed by the MIT paper and the Savanna College of Art and Design paper, among many others.

+ More of Tony’s work

All the other children called him froggy. “He looks like a frog,” they’d say. “If you squint real hard,” they’d say. “Those drab green clothes. He has that froggy way about him,” they’d say. “That pond smell; that bull-legged way about him; those puffy jowls; that mysteriously thin straight line for a mouth; the bulging, ping-pong-ball eyes; the weak chin; the sloping forehead; the manner in which the back of his head is so small; that pin-head quality about him, that football shaped head, and those warts, oh those warts, what a spectacular collection. . . .”

His clothes were too old, too green, too small, too tight, too smelly – a weird momma’s boy smell. His hair too greasy, too matted. His head was like a lopsided lump of fruit rolling on bony, handlebar shoulders. His freckles were mere blights of disorganized rust tripping across his pale face.

The children would push him down the stairs. And kick his books. They’d have contests. In the halls they’d give him tremendous snuggies, reaching into his outdated, olive pants to yank up his underwear from behind. They’d hoist him to his tippy-toes, tapping a quick dance on the hard terrazzo floor, not relieving him until his face achieved a specific shade of crimson.

At recess he would often wander off the school grounds down to the river where he could find peace in the rocks that he would collect. His favorites were the aggies, with their swirls of colors spinning together as one perfect jewel. He would have to sneak back carefully, hiding the rocks in his unfashionably dark socks as the children would often catch him and make him swallow his treasures.

On field trips they would cram red-hots up his nose. On the playground they would funnel sand through their cupped hands into his throat. And they would hold contests to see how far they could throw him. It was a game soon dubbed “catapult.” On the bus home they’d make him eat sticks and leaves and worms because, they figured, frogs liked sticks and leaves and worms.

They’d make him eat saw dust. They’d pour glue in his hair. They’d fill his locker with dead squirrels after they’d fermented them in the sun. They’d put his head in the toilet and flush the lever, insuring that all the girls, with their little electric smiles, would run away from him. They’d make up songs about him – choruses, operas, vast arias, tender lullabies, cute rhyming jingles, and clever limericks with tiny little hooks. And that was all just on Tuesdays.

He was an easy target, so thin he couldn’t fight back – what was the use? It only made things worse. They cemented the social order with their gossip. And as the propaganda swelled, even the teachers began to turn against him, casually referring to him as froggy, whether he was around or not.

Later in life froggy staggered off to college where he ultimately prospered in the concrete industry, perhaps inspired by all the aggregate he passed through his system earlier in life on that vast, bright, hot, lonely, magnifying glass of a playground.

He never married, but had squirrels for pets and that alchemy business – mixing different things together to construct something new and solid – bridges and roads and buildings and big, solid, heavy things – monuments that would last for years, monuments that reached into the future, far beyond anyone’s grasp, reaching far beyond anyone’s vision. He’d build them so he could be there himself, far far away, in another place none of us could even imagine, in a place none of us could touch.

He was getting pretty large in the region – state contracts, unions, politicians, that sort of thing. I’d see his photo in the paper every now and then, all curt and natty now. He was into pretty much everything. For a long time I felt he was concentrating his efforts into an endeavor that, frankly, was a size or so too large for his personality. I figured he’d end up becoming a biology professor or maybe a Department of Natural Resources guy. I just figured he’d be happier that way – alone in the weeds by some forgotten stream.

That’s about the time I seem to have felt it began to happen. One day I was reading the newspaper. I was reading about an old classmate who mysteriously disappeared. Eventually he turned up in over 3000 cans of a popular brand of tuna. A horrible fate to be sure, and amplified by the fact that the guy was notoriously reputed to detest tuna.

Then one day another classmate was found several blocks from town, filled with sand, his mouth and nose caulked shut with insulating sealant. Then there was that guy they discovered tarred over in the road, his arms stretched out, trying to cover his head. And another they happened upon who was glued to a wall. As they peeled him off, they noticed he was unusually heavy. The X-rays proved their speculation – that he had been filled with rocks. They discovered another classmate in a field two counties over. The medical examiner said it was as if he’d been catapulted into the air and had traveled a great distance. Another was found floating down a stream – flat as an oak leaf, but curled up at the ends, as if he’d been steamrollered. Another guy came home from work one day and discovered that his house was completely gone – not a crumb, not a thread, not a piece of lint left of it. The spot where his house was supposed to be was all flat and covered with sod. Squirrels foraged for nuts in the leaves where his house should’ve been. His house was missing, gone, vanished, and they never found any of it – all his belongings, his entire life erased. One gal walked out to her driveway one morning to find their camper, boat, and three family cars crushed into hay bale sized crinkly metal cubes. Each crumpled, gleaming, jazzy metal chunk was neatly returned to its spot on the driveway and next to the garage. Eventually she had the metal chunks brought downstairs to use as furniture in their pool room. Another guy was unfortunate enough to have found himself just a little too close to a brick making machine. It is believed he was eventually distributed all over the state. Perhaps he is a part of your new patio or garage.

There was a lot of talk around town, suspicious murmurs and rumors and that sort. Was it all just coincidence? A bad run of fate? Bad hoodoo? Why couldn’t people leave well enough alone? The past is just best left in the past. Let bygones be bygones. Why hold on to things? Water under the bridge and all that after all.

There was a lot of talk about that overweight kid. What was his name? They say froggy gave him the money to buy the towing company he worked at. Now I don’t know if all that was true, but everytime I’m out and about – running errands or what have you – and I can’t find my car, maybe two or three times a year, it always seems to turn up in the city impound lot.
This was all well and good, I thought, sitting comfortably, observing from the safe distance of my cozy reading chair in my living room in the suburbs. From time to time classmates of ours would pop up in the paper, stuffed in this device or caught in that, found in a grassy field just outside of town, their bodies a distorted mystery to be unraveled. Hooray! I say. Hooray for all the children! Hooray for froggy!

And then the other night I was watching television tucked safely away in my living room. The game was just getting good when I felt a truck rumbling up – a big truck sneaking up the block. I watched, peeking through the drapes in my suburban paranoia as a large, heavy-duty cement truck squeaked to a shuttering stop in front of my driveway. I could feel that heavy beast idling in my chest, oscillating back and forth, to and fro, coiled up with a rapid pulse.

It was pitch black out. The truck’s lights weren’t on. The damn monster revved to growl and purr menacingly for a few moments, and then slowly lurched forward to creep out of sight in a huff of exhaust.

The next morning word spread from down the block that a distant classmate of mine awoke to find his pool filled with rotting, dead frogs. They had to shovel them out with snow shovels and pitchforks. It took all weekend to load them into plastic garbage bags. Eventually they had to retile the entire pool.

About a week later I returned from a business trip in which I was able to bring my family along. We got in late. The world was dark and quiet. Everything so quiet and still, frozen in a peace I wouldn’t even want to describe, a peace I wouldn’t want to disturb. I laid in bed with my eyes open, and I felt that peace settling inside of me like the leaves drifting off the trees to blow away with the wind.

The next morning I awoke very early to retrieve my morning paper. The sun was just creeping up over the city, shadows stretching to search for new homes, pushing against the lazy purple and green horizon.

I opened my door to find my front step stretching out before me. It had grown to cover the yard, the entire yard smoothly entombed under a four inch blanket of white concrete, yawning exquisitely out to the street, as smooth and shiny as a baby’s backside.
I was stunned, and yet strangely exhilarated.

I stepped out onto it in mouth-open wonder. My slippers shuffled on its drying softness. As I walked, leaves pittered with the breeze across its smooth, hard surface.

The craftsmanship was inspiring – the way it terminated perfectly at the street with a crisp, sharp edge. The way it coated the trees twelve feet up in a snug, warm glove. I turned to discover they had completed much of the siding as well, concrete creeping up with crude plywood forms bolted in and tied back with rusting, blushing, threaded rods – up, up, up and over and back down the other side in some places.

Marvelous!

Tremendous!

Applause! Applause!

Encore!

I was moved.

Later, I discovered they had ambitiously completed the entire backyard as well, hugging the flower beds, blanketing the garden, covering my boat, hiding my wife’s car under a soft hush of concrete. It was an impressive sight. Poor Sparky, he sat there stoically, an attentive statue, a mere bump in the middle of the backyard. I stood there in the sparkling morning sun in my soft flannel pajamas – the ones beautifully imprinted with the faces of notorious underworld crime figures. I felt that concrete under me, my skin getting warm as if I were Sparky, preserved in time, wearing it forever as it spread out to discover new lives, new events, new times.

I can’t recall if I ever did anything to poor old froggy – perhaps I did, or maybe I did not. But I was there and that was enough for me. Hooray, I say. Hooray for all the children, for we have taught one another well.

I went back inside and gently climbed back into bed as if steadying myself into a small rowboat, careful not to wake even the littlest of things. I closed my eyes as if after an unfavorable dream, as if to clean that ugly mirror of time, as if to wipe it all away, hoping to awaken with everything returned as fresh and bright as it had always been.

Astrological shadows crawled across the ceiling – constellations of the rising sun projecting through the enthusiastic fall leaves. But all I could think of were the shadows on the patio lawn and froggy as a child, revving that truck, driving it in his mind.

© Tony Rauch

Holly Mitchell

Holly Mitchell is a 2012 recipient of the Gertrude Claytor Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems can be currently or soon found at several journals including Ishaan Review, Lavender Review, and The Bakery.

+ More of Tony’s work

arches into dusk.
A frog reaches out,
her arms flattened in the gravel drive.
          So this is your home.
These are your denim boys,
your videogames and honeysuckle,
your burnt meats.
This is your father’s
forbidden jug of peach wine,
your grandmother’s pair of pit bulls,
your oiled ATV.
The boys I know are leaving,
fast in their tinted cars.
Katie unfurls in the hammock, the text
messages from her boyfriend
land on her brown lap
like sparks. Another rising
freshman melts into your thigh.
While I fetch tinder,
a strand of your red hair
flies inside my mouth.
          This means nothing,
but you can’t have it back.

© Holly Mitchell

Matthew Dexter

Like nomadic Pericú natives centuries earlier, Matthew Dexter survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of shrimp tacos, smoked marlin, cold beer, and tropical sunshine. He lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

+ Matthew’s work

+ More of Matthew’s work

It was the day the maid found the weed under your desk, tucked inside a scrap of folded printer paper protruding above the metal crossbar screwed to the wooden desktop, and she asked if she should remove the ashes from your pipe and handed back the paper with the gentle expurgation that she assumed it was trash, yes, that was the afternoon the baby went for her first ride in the Toyota with the car seat positioned in the corner opposite where she was normally strapped. This new buckled-in position would be beneficial, allowing the driver better perspective for observing the angelic rear-facing countenance at red lights and stop signs. A perfect father never would have allowed his little pumpkin to travel forward-facing for longer than a few days, if not weeks, before realizing that babies under forty pounds needed to be facing the worn-leather–but he is not a perfect anything–and the battered baby seat nothing more than duct tape, colored rubber bands, and dried-up semen stains from dates with cougars. It is difficult for middle-aged married men and whores to find places to bump flesh, especially when they are poor and marriage is the ball and chain that mixes with the urine and fecal matter of child numero uno.

***

It was the maid’s first day on the job and you were embarrassed enough that it should come to inviting a young maiden into your desecrated palace; with iron-lunged defeat you open your lips and she touches your palms and smiles and you fall deep into that elevator shaft between your legs and her irises and you can feel your stomach rising like a child on a seesaw as you sink from her wrinkle-less forehead to freshly pedicured toes painted pink as the cherry blossoms ripening on the branches outside. The garden is all you keep up: organic tomatoes, jalapeños, cucumbers, basil. This is the playground where you buried the dogs that disappeared when the children were at nursery school. Their skulls shattered beneath the rusty shovel from the shed where you caught your husband sitting in a cobwebbed corner having his penis petted by the meanest looking cougar you have ever seen. Her arm muscles flexed with every pump of blood, this sadistic massage fueled by watermelon wine coolers and an unexpected afternoon thunderstorm. Drilling into her eyes, your husband with his shut, you stared down the wild animal in its new sanctuary, the grunts of the man who fathered your children, eyelids quivering with the brushstroke of lightning and the thunder making him jump with every carnal instinct and then shivering in carnival ecstasy. You approach, watching as the veins on her arms expand, purple and blue blood bursting through her wrist into his loins, pumping life into this middle-aged earthling, this hairy horrible specimen of Australopithecus, everything that went wrong with your family. The cougar bites her lips and jerks her head as the husband bursts and so close the shrapnel of this safari is nothing more than something for raindrops to wash away. You slink away into the storm, away from the madness, the animal inside of you already gnawing through your belly.

***

He backed out the driveway as hastily as if he were pulling his scarred penis out from one of his Felinae whores. He had beaten his appendage to a pulp as a teenager and bared that pink band on the inside like a trophy or ribbon from a swimming contest. He would do the backstroke through the sweat-waxed hair of his triumph, the trophy nothing more than ejaculation on a stomach and the number of the beast written in cursive. Dripping into the numbest of corners, he filled the air with the stench of passion and impregnated the conscience of invisible matter floating toward the spring draft borne from windows opened at the moment a woman lets herself go, completely, giving away everything she is, all she has known, all she can become, just for three seconds of knowing he is gone forever. Now imagining what he must have been thinking as his Firestone tires with their plastic hairs still unkempt, crunching against the cracks that led to the ramshackle hoarder’s paradise where you cooked his offspring. With each child, you lose a piece of yourself, the space between the clutter and the arteries pumping venom each time he rolls into your bed with the pussy juice clinging to his member, as if this secret club is something that he is too brilliant to forfeit.

***

She knows exactly what to do; when to do it too. You pass the kitchen–insurmountable for years–the maid god knows where. Later that evening after her first visit, the woman would call child protective services. She was the finest, but nothing could make a dent in the mess of your family since he spoiled it with his poisonous tail. You know severing all ties to sanity is always the last best option. The maid was god know where when your numero uno must have grabbed the orange scissors from the inner pockets of her figure skating jacket. You are confident in her training. It had taken months but the mission was complete as soon as those tires crunched onto the pavement and you lost sight of the Toyota as it drifted beyond asphalt into the camouflage of cherry blossoms and elderly oak and pine which sucked the air from your lungs. Beyond moldy boxes, you search for the labyrinth of Styrofoam and plastic and broken appliances which lead to the crib. The baby is missing. You can see that clearly–the crib is the cleanest thing in the

***

Sucking her toes in the back of the Toyota in her new corner, the baby grins, watching the windows as the car slows, worn-out brake pads squealing against the soda-soaked tarmac. The infant does not notice that her father is waiting in line at the Jack in the Box drive-through. Dad always opens his zipper because the manager is one of his cougars. He would whisper into the machine as numero uno gripped the scissors and waited for the perfect moment when the appendage was visible and as soon as he ordered a Sourdough Jack she could see her target expanding. She handed him the milkshakes and brown bags and he reached his arms out of the Toyota as he always did to offer a gesticulation similar to a gang sign or a virgin firing a rifle for the first time during an African safari. That is when the father had his membership revoked, his penis severed by the hands of numero uno and out the window the cougar watched as the girl tossed the magic wand into oncoming traffic and Dad far from perfect, he pulled out into pedestrians, one bouncing off his windshield as he drove with his left hand, glass covered in labyrinthine cracks, of life, and darkness all the baby could understand as the Greyhound drove through them and the colored rubber bands burst against her face and duct-taped mansion collapsed beneath a tin of smoking metal and crunched inertia.

***

Lunch was warm lard that afternoon. You have since stopped smoking, only to cherish the memory of what it must have sounded like. Acapulco is a fine place to become a cougar.

© Matthew Dexter

Laura LeHew

Laura LeHew is an award winning poet with a myriad of work appearing in journals and anthologies such as the Ambush Review, Anobium, Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined, Eleven Eleven, Filling Station, PANK, and Slice. Forthcoming: It’s Always Night, It Always Rains, fall 2012 (Winterhawk Press) and Willingly Would I Burn, spring 2013 (MoonPath Press). Beauty (Tiger’s Eye Press) is in its 3rd printing. Laura received her MFA in writing from CCA, writing residencies from Soapstone and the Montana Artists Refuge and interned for CALYX Journal. She writes, edits and sharpens her claws in Eugene, Oregon.

+ Uttered Chaos

it started slowly without screams
it slept in luminous taffeta
it started with an annoying bird—
a persistent cat
shattering symmetry

impaled beneath me
the galaxy speaks strangely
an ocean of scars
his eyes are fire or
a pipe dream

interrupted violence
goes unpunished
floods through temptation
needle, glass, flame
the treachery of abandonment

I should have noticed
the uninterrupted moment
when it would be worse when
we would become
all the emptiness of stars

© Laura Lehew