13.2 / FALL / WINTER 2018

Pink Noise   Blueberry and thyme bubbling in a skillet. Your beautiful nose running   around Barcelona. Watching lottery numbers fall from the sky like Bolaño. This I imagine   is where you go when you’re not pressing symbols into my hand,   buying a new pair of glasses years later.

__   Alex Checkovich is an instructor of ‘the body in space’ at the University of Richmond, where he teaches freshman seminars called ‘Nature,’ ‘Health,’ and ‘Technology in American History.’  His main interest is inventing/discovering Oulipo nonfictions. Essays are out or forthcoming with Seneca Review, Badlands, Gravel, Five:2:One’s #thesideshow, and Breathe Free Press.

I Did an Ugly Thing Once, But It Was In a Beautiful Room   When I knelt at the Temple of Nature, I keened, “O! Wreck me, wreck my guts, daddy.”   I have given everything to the earth that has pulled me through a lonely winter.

Birthday On the day I was born, my father brought me into the world. I mean this literally because my mother was unconscious. The doctors pumped her with so much anesthesia when they were cutting me out of her that she stopped breathing.

Outside Speedy’s, just right of the packaged ice and snuggled to the side of the building, there was a cage with a hand-painted sign that read, “BEHOLD THE DEVILS DOG.” The paint was red, and the squiggly letters dripped bloody hell-snot.

i. Here’s the old wives’ tale again: rocks withstand the ocean’s beating because it makes them soft; every witch only wants to be the princess. True, I wanted the dress; I wanted the golden shoes; I wanted the pretty prince pinned beneath me.

I. My parents divorced when I was a baby.  A few hours after my mom dropped me off at my dad’s for the weekend, she ran into him at the mall outside the toddlers’ play area.  But she didn’t see me, the purple dress, or the bow she’d put in my smoothed hair.

I had sex last night. At first, the warmth of his skin surprised me. I remember it because it was the temperature of the tea he had made me. The leaves were strained – all of them. The milk was the perfect amount. It was carefully prepared, I could tell, and it was flattering.

“Sheer darling! Starlet flaunts her incredible post baby body”             Kelly scattered the newspapers and magazines around the base of the aquarium and watched as the paper absorbed the water dripping down the glass, the words and pictures melting away into nothing.

I am pregnant with Henry, my wife says, and I am surprised. We are not trying to have a child. She also looks surprised. I don’t know why I said that. She says. I just felt like it was true.

Elegy for the Boys at Shadowland Laser Tag I had discovered this other world within the world, inhabited only by boys huddled in corners hugging plastic guns. Everything was coated in phosphorescence. I mimicked them so quickly, the boys, learning to wear my glowing green heart strapped, fearless, outside my chest.

Emily, I can’t imagine telling you, but want to tell you the truth about your sister tonight, like we used to tell each other the truth under the hot covers when we were kids. When I half-lived at your house for five years, and our breath smelled like bubblegum, your house’s special toothpaste flavor.

I. Nuova “Scene 1” … someone says … “Take 91” … someone says … “Hurry” … “Please hurry.” In the poem that I want to write everything happens too late. Everything happens too quickly. Everything follows us but ahead us. Image of your lighthouse hands. Image of a sinking country. It starts like this.

I remember asking for the pellet gun, finding it under the Christmas tree. That winter the birds were too fast for me. All the boys at school could shoot. I’d been told to practice. Front and rear sight lined on the bird and the pellet would go straight to.

She was always getting smaller. Leaning over the drafting table—the one she had bought for next to nothing at a liquidation sale in Rosemont—she hid herself inside her work.

Guilt Offering               if you fear you ate forbidden meat (hooves not split nor cud chewed)             take a ram without blemish and money for the sons of Aaron   because I might have possibly there’s a chance I tasted flesh that is other I feed the sons shamefaced coins   blood splashed on

There is a loud BOOM and I jump in the chair. When I turn around, I see that my husband Dan has forgotten to place a laundry basket in between the bathroom door and its frame to prevent the wind from slamming it shut.

Rakesh runs his fingers on my midriff, warns about the humidity at this time of the year in Guwahati. Adjusting the pleats of my sari, I think about his mother.