13.1 / SPRING / SUMMER 2018

Blank Chapel or, Consuelo’s Mistake The empty doorway cried escape to her by name, so she took the invitation to step in, unwrap the rain from her face & wait for the storm to pay its sudden visit.

I step onto the down escalator, anticipating that delicious expansion of the lungs, breath turned into Cabernet, that will happen when I catch sight of my son, Gabe.  The voices of my fellow travelers tinkle like wind chimes above the grumble and beep of the baggage carousel below us.

We held our breaths. We held onto balloons until we couldn’t stand up. We couldn’t stop. We had to stop. We didn’t know better. It had to be better. We made it better. We played with our mouths open until butterflies flew out. We knew they had the answers. We forgot the questions.

If you don’t have woods, have water. Have ocean. Have wave. If you don’t have dapple, have starlight. Have end-of-summer air that blows into your cheeks and arms, your breastbone and knees.

we have always been Frenzy deep down, quiet on the out, we were tangle, caught between woman and man, impossibility and lack, no gender a tongue knew name, the richness of body plundered by language, left aching for touch and a place at the human table.

Not healed but not bloody beneath the scab, the body has been working on itself, quietly in the night knitting back together against my best efforts. Forgiveness, how you claim no nerve. The scab peels away with such satisfaction nothing can replace it. What pleasure a snake must get from pulling out of its ghost.

I sit blue bitter, still brittle. I trill tube bells. Rebut slurs, little sister. It’s utter lies, bull bluster, slut-rust rites. I bristle bustle. I birl. Bruits bruise, but I’ll resist ire. I’ll be brute lite, lest it blister, lest it slit tribes. Rules tilt results. Ruts blur rutile ruses. Stir litter. Let ribs bust.

When the headache begins, I don’t realize what’s happening. I think the pressure must be an allergy attack, a particularly severe congestion in my sinuses. I press my fingers against the left side of my face, feeling the bones around my eye socket. In the next moment I recall crying.

               

|———————————————————————————————————-|   This is the distance between Theodore and a table of desserts. What he wants most is the baklava. If he were to close the distance between he and it, this baklava would be his 211th. Theodore keeps precise count of his many cravings and conquests.

   

Our first Christmas together, my boyfriend gave me a simulated shrunken head. It came in a plain brown cardboard box, just the size of a head, shrunk. There was no marketing, no explanatory text.

The summer I turned nine was like every summer before—except for Raiju, of course. He grew out of my bellybutton as Raiju is inclined to do, but that was entirely my fault. I never knew my biological father, and he probably never knew Raiju. But that was not my fault.

THE ROAD TO KANZAKI: A STORY ABOUT THE WAR AS TOLD BY MY AUNT KEIKO On the road to Kanzaki, she found an oddly soothing quality in the ox’s clocking trot, the wood cart’s creak and sway as the sun slid and clouds bloomed with evening’s lilac brown.

A young kid in his mother’s basement makes plans. Soon he will ask Heather out. He will lean against his locker and play it cool. What’d you do this weekend? Me neither. He carves another hash mark into an old desk with a blown-out pen he used to write love letters he never sent.

I text Rachel the lyrics from Alison Morissette’s “One Hand in My Pocket:”                                                                                                   I’m sad, but I’m happy Sends me triple happy faces with pink heart-eyes in return. Rachel’s wavering between child and woman; no doubt the same as Alison when she wrote it. Her Babi’s wavering, too— more like Shakespeare’s snail, ‘going backwards.

My mother isn’t always Raggedy Ann, but she was when I was born. Week before Halloween, office party. Not at the office, but at Richard Nixon’s basement apartment. She sipped on Shirley Temples while my jelly fists pommeled her beneath her denim thrift-store jumper.

Ukraine. Rural Ukraine. Woods. Trees. Just about as much trees as you’d see in a Ukrainian folktale describing the wolf running. I am saying this in reference to Sirko, a Ukrainian folktale. There is always a wolf running.